THE FRENCH INSTITUTE. 87 



L 'Academie des Sciences, like the Royal Society of England, 

 had a pre-official existence. A company of scientific men were 

 accustomed to meet weekly at the house of some of the members 

 in order to discuss, in an informal way, the current scientific top- 

 ics of the day. Colbert, with wise discernment, saw that it would 

 be advantageous to give them official recognition. He induced 

 Louis XIV to bestow upon the newly organized body extensive 

 grants for pensions, experiments, and instruments. Under this 

 provisional charter the Academy met for the first time on De- 

 cember 22, 16G6, in the rooms of the Royal Library. From this 

 time forward a regular account of the proceedings has been kept, 

 and for the first time it was called L 'Academie des Sciences. 



Within the very year of Colbert's incorporating the Academy 

 there was returned to Paris for interment the body of one who, 

 more than any one else, gave life and direction to the Academy 

 during its earlier and more informal years. Although having 

 spent the greater part of his life in Holland, Descartes was a 

 Frenchman, and lived for a while in Paris, where, in fact, many 

 of his greatest physical investigations were begun. Descartes 

 was a ferment. Already in England Bacon had cut himself loose 

 from the Aristotelian philosophy of the school-men. Descartes 

 followed with a similar upheaval upon the Continent. Yet the 

 two philosophies were in no way akin, save in the interest their 

 works aroused for the study of nature. In Bacon's shameless 

 race for state honors his philosophical studies were but diver- 

 sions ; consequently his philosophy was vague and undefined. To 

 Descartes, in his almost ascetic life, his philosophical studies be- 

 came an all-absorbing passion ; consequently his system of philos- 

 ophy, if not clear in all its details, was pointed and forceful, and 

 swept as if by storm over both the scientific and metaphysical 

 worlds. 



Colbert, pursuant of the policy of Louis XIV to make Paris 

 the intellectual as well as the political center of Europe, invited 

 Huygens to leave the Hague and take up his residence in Paris. 

 This he did in 1G66, France receiving from Holland this celebrated 

 mathematician and astronomer in exchange for her loss of Des- 

 cartes, who gave the best part of his life to that country. Huy- 

 gens was not the only foreigner whom the honors and pensions of 

 Louis XIV induced to leave their native land ; Romer, a Danish 

 astronomer, and the great Italian astronomer, Dominic Cassini, 

 being among the most eminent. Since the astronomical labors of 

 these three men were so interwoven and interdependent, they can 

 be considered together. 



The Observatory of Paris was established in 1667, eight years 

 before the Observatory of Greenwich was built. The French 

 monarch appointed Cassini as the first director of the National 



