186 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



print, so that he feared that it would be necessary to order from 

 America Bowditch's translation. In this emergency Madame de 

 Laplace, always devoted to the reputation and memory of her dead 

 husband, was negotiating for the sale of a small farm in order to pro- 

 vide tbe means of republishing his works, when the government of 

 Louis Philippe took the matter in hand and appropriated forty thou- 

 sand francs for a new edition. This appeared, in seven quarto vol- 

 umes, between 1843 aud 1847. At a later period, when this edition 

 was nearly exhausted, General Laplace, the distinguished son of the 

 mathematician, and his granddaughter, the Marquise de Colbert, ex- 

 pended seventy thousand francs on a third edition, which appeared 

 between 1878 and 1886. 



Laplace was the friend of young mathematicians and physicists, 

 such as Arago, Poisson, and Biot, who were called " the adopted 

 children of bis thought." At an early age, while still a pupil in the 

 Polytechnic School, Arago was attached to the Paris Observatory as 

 secretary. He has given in his Autobiography the following inter- 

 esting sketch of Laplace. He says : " I entered this establishment, 

 then, on the nomination of Poisson, my friend, and through the inter- 

 vention of Laplace. The latter loaded me with civilities. I was 

 happy and proud when I dined in the Rue de Tournon with the great 

 geometer. My mind and my heart were much disposed to admire all, 

 to respect all, that was associated with one who had discovered the 

 cause of the secular acceleration of the moon, had found in the move- 

 ment of this satellite the means of calculating the ellipticity of the 

 earth, had traced to the laws of gravitation the long inequality of 

 Jupiter and Saturn, etc., etc. But what was my disenchantment when, 

 one day, I heard Madame de Laplace approach her husband, and say 

 to him, 'Will you intrust to me the key of the sugar ?' : 



Another anecdote told by Arago is not so complimentary to La- 

 place. Delambre, the Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Paris, 

 died on the 19th of August, 1822. A committee was appointed to 

 present candidates for the succession. The choice lay between Fou- 

 rier and Biot. The election was always by secret ballot, — Arago 

 frankly saying that no one wished to incur the disaffection of a suc- 

 cessful candidate against whom he had voted. Laplace wrote the 

 same name upon two ballots, put them in his hat, and shook them up. 

 He took one out and tore it, and put the other in the urn, pretend- 

 ing not to know for whom he had voted, though an indiscreet neighbor 

 did. No calculus of probabilities, Arago says, was needed for this 

 problem. 



