THE PRUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 425 



for science unless it proved itself useful. Nevertheless, useless as lie 

 deemed them to be, he disturbed neither the universities nor the acad- 

 emy. He contented himself with ridiculing the pretensions of the 

 members of the latter and their methods of study. Yet he had some 

 respect for the science of medicine and that of chemistry. In these 

 two branches of study Berlin, during this period, was eminent. But 

 apart from the Gymnasium Director Frisch and the Eoyal Librarian 

 La Croze there were in the city no philologists, historians, jurists or 

 theologians of the first rank. If the king permitted the academy to 

 live, he took pleasure in crippling its resources and in compelling it 

 to pay salaries to men outside its membership, men who experimented 

 in medicine and chemistry and were willing to carry out his wishes. 

 During the period 1716-1740 only five volumes of miscellanies were 

 published aside from the observations which appeared in the calendar. 

 The fate of the academy might have been better had it issued, as Leibniz 

 wished it to do, a volume every year. 



Sixteen months after the death of Leibniz the vacant presidency 

 was filled by the appointment to it of Jacob Paul Gundling, a man of 

 considerable knowledge, a fine story teller and the butt of the king's 

 wit. He was the author of about a dozen volumes on historical and 

 economic subjects, but was drunk a good deal of the time and altogether 

 unfit to hold an office to which a man like Leibniz had given dignity. 

 Thirteen years later, in 1733, acting on the advice of minister von 

 Vierecke, the king made Jabloniski president and the academy began 

 to show signs of a new life. A few famous men had settled in Berlin 

 and some of them had accepted membership in the academy. But 

 complete deliverance came only with the king's death and the accession 

 to the throne. May 31, 1740, of his son Frederick the Great, who in 

 almost all respects was the opposite of his father. This was the be- 

 ginning of the new era, an era in which French thought prevailed, the 

 era of Maupertuis, D'Alembert and Condorcet. 



