^ M. Arago^s Historical Eloge of Joseph Fourier, 



When, at a later period, allied Europe launches against 

 France a million of soldiers ; when it is necessary to raise all 

 at once fourteen armies, it is the ingenuous author of the Essai 

 sur les Machines, and of the Geomctrie de position, who directs 

 this gigantic operation. It is also Carnot, our honourable 

 Jellow member, who presides during the incomparable campaign 

 of seventeen months, in which the French, novices in the art of 

 war, gain eight pitched battles, come off victorious in one hun- 

 dred and forty fights, occupy one hundred and sixteen fortified 

 places, and two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts, enrich our 

 arsenals with four thousand cannons and seventy thousand 

 muskets, make one hundred thousand prisoners, and cover the 

 dome of the Invalides with ninety flags. At the same time, 

 the Chaptals, the Fourcroys, the Monges, the Berthollets also 

 contributed to the defence of French Nationality ; some by ex- 

 tracting from our soil, by prodigies of industry, every particle 

 of saltpetre which it contained ; others by converting, by means 

 of new and rapid processes, the bells of towns, -.villages, and 

 even the smallest hamlets, into a formidable artillery, of which 

 our enemies naturally believed that we were destitute. At tlie 

 call of the country in danger, another academician, the young 

 and learned Meunier, willingly renounced the seductive occupa- 

 tions of the laboratory ; he went to gain renown on the ram- 

 parts of Konigstein, and to assist like a hero in the long defence 

 of Mayence ; and he fell at the age of forty, after having ob- 

 tained the first rank in a garrison which could boast of the 

 Aubert-Dubayets, the Beaupuys, the Haxos, the Klebers. 



How could I here omit the last secretary of the old Academy. 

 Follow him in a celebrated assembly, in that convention whose 

 sanguinary delirium one might almost pardon, on recollecting 

 how gloriously terrible it was to the enemies of our independ- 

 ence, and you always see the illustrious Condorcet exclusively 

 occupied with the great interests of Ireason and humanity. You 

 hear him " execrate the shameful system of piracy which for 

 two centuries depopulated, by corrupting, the African conti- 

 nent ;" you hear him demand in accents of perfect conviction, 

 •^^ that our codes should be purified of that frightful capital punish- 

 ment, which renders the errors of judges for ever irreparable; 

 he is the official organ of the assembly on every occasion when 



