12 M. Arago's Historical Elogc of Joseph Fourier. 



and the first naturalists in the world, the Convention conferred 

 on the office of the instructor an unusual eclat, whose happy ef- 

 fects we still feel. In the e}'es of the public, a title which had 

 been borne by the La Granges, the La Places, the Monges, 

 and the Berthollets, became, with reason, e^ual to that of the 

 highest rank. If, under the empire, the Polytechnic School 

 numbered among its working professors counsellors of state, 

 ministers, and the president of the senate, it is only to be ex- 

 plained by the impetus given by the normal school. 



Look at the professors in the old great colleges, almost con- 

 cealed behind their papers, reading from the chair, amid the 

 indifference and inattention of their pupils, discourses carefully 

 prepared, and which, each year, reappeared the same. Nothing 

 of this kind occurred at the normal school : oral discourses were 

 alone allowed. The authorities even went so far as to require 

 from the illustrious learned men who had the charge of teach- 

 ing, a formal promise never to deliver lectures which they had 

 committed to memory. Since that time the chair has become 

 a tribune whence the professor, identified as it were with his 

 hearers, sees in their looks, their gestures, and their appear- 

 ance, sometimes the propriety of hastening on, sometimes, on 

 the contrary, the necessity of returning back, of awaking the 

 attention by some incidental observations, and presenting under 

 a new form the idea which had not at first been clearly under- 

 stood. And do not imagine that the beautiful extempore dis- 

 courses with which the amphitheatre of the normal school re- 

 sounded, remained unknown to the public : short-hand writers, 

 paid by the state, took them down. Their papers, after being 

 revised by the professors, were sent to the 1500 pupils, to the 

 members of the convention, the consuls and agents of the re- 

 public in foreign countries, and to all the official people of the 

 districts. In comparison to the parsimonious and niggardly ha- 

 bits of our time, this certainly was prodigality. Yet no one 

 would repeat this reproach, however slight it may appear, if I 

 were permitted to point out within these very precincts, an il- 

 lustrious academician who had his mathematical genius reveal- 

 ed to him in an obscure provincial town by the lectures of the 

 normal school. 



The necessity of stating the important, but now forgotten 



