7 24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



which our citations do not undertake to illustrate, is filled, for in- 

 stance, with ingenious conceits which, though falling coldly on mod- 

 ern ears, were considered in the happiest taste by the audience to 

 whom the book was addressed. But they are of an artificial clever- 

 ness, and precisely what we might expect from the man who was said 

 to have " as good a heart as could be made of brains." 



Sainte-Beuve has well indicated our author's strength and weakness 

 by comparing his clever opera-box view of Nature with that of Pascal 

 in the majestic movement of the awe-inspired passage at the begin- 

 ing of the " Pensees." ! While agreeing to the judgment of the great 

 critic, it may be observed, however, that, if Fontenelle be devoid of 

 poetry, he has at least one image of a grace nearly allied to it. He 

 has been speaking of the chances of the sun's light failing us wholly, 

 as it is said to have partially done in the year following the death of 

 Caesar, and pointing out, with what seems justice, the imperfect 

 grounds for the confidence of mankind in the constancy of Nature's 

 action here in the future as in the past, founded as that confidence 

 is on an experience of the human race so long, judged by its life, so 

 short in comparison with Nature's own. With a sort of pathetic 

 sense of the fallacy, he compares this little accumulated experience 

 of the generations of man to the traditions of some roses of a day, 

 leaving each to its successor an account of the gardener in whom suc- 

 cessive ages of these ephemeral flowers have seen no change. " We 

 have always seen the same gardener ; in the memory of roses none has 

 been seen but him ; ichat he has ever been, that he is now: surely he does 

 not die as we, or change." 



Fontenelle, throughout the "Conversations," adopts the Cartesian 

 hypothesis of "vortices" in accounting for the planetary movements, 

 and this, indeed, he continued to cling to long after. The true theory 

 of gravitation had been given by Newton, and obtained complete ac- 

 ceptance in England. His more serious work is to be found chiefly 

 in the well-known "Eloges," which, as perpetual secretary of the 

 French Academy of Sciences, he pronounced on its deceased asso- 

 ciates ; but it is probable that he will, nevertheless, be remembered as 

 much by these " Conversations," which, had they no other merit, 

 would always possess an historical interest, as opening the way to 

 our present popular scientific literature. 



We should not close this imperfect notice of them without again 

 reminding the reader that the form of a dialogue gives the original 

 an attraction which is necessarily missed in brief extracts, and that 

 the plan on which they thus rest for uniting instruction and amuse- 

 ment (a plan which obliges the imaginary speaker to be paying his 

 court and talking science at the same time) would have been a failure 

 in almost any hands but those which could manage so difficult a 

 blending, and keep as far from pedantry as from ridicule. Fontenelle's 



" Que l'homme contemple done la nature entiere dans sa haute et pleine rnajeste," etc. 



