14G JOSEPH FOURIER. 



not suppose that the beautiful impromptu lectures with which the amphi- 

 theater of the Normal School resounded remained unknown to the 

 public. Short-hand writers paid by the State reported them. The 

 sheets, after beinj? revised by the professors, were sent to the fifteen 

 hundred pupils, to the members of convention, to the consuls and agents 

 of the republic in foreign countries, to all governors of districts. There 

 was in this something certainly of profusion compared with the parsi- 

 monious and mean habits of our time. Nobody, however, would concur 

 in this reproach, however slight it may appear, if I were permitted to 

 point out in this very apartment an illustrious Academician, whose 

 mathematical genius was awakened by the lectures of the Normal School 

 in an obscure district town. 



The necessity of demonstrating the important services, ignored in the 

 present day, for which the dissemination of the sciences is indebted to 

 the first Normal School, has inducod me to dwell at greater length on the 

 subject than I intended. I hope to be pardoned ; the example in any 

 case will not be contagious. Eulogiums of the past, you know, gentle- 

 men, are no longer fashionable. Everything which is said, everything 

 which is printed, induces us to suppose that the world is the creation of 

 yesterday. This opinion, which allows to each a part more or less 

 brilliant in the cosmogonic drama, is under the safeguard of too many 

 vanities to have anything to fear from the efforts of logic. 



I have already stated that the brilliant success of Fourier at the Nor- 

 mal School assigned to him a distinguished place among the persons 

 whom natiu^e has endowed in the highest degree with the talent of jjub- 

 lic tuition. Accordingly, he was not forgotten by the founders of the 

 Polytechnic School. Attached to that celebrated establishment, first 

 with the titJe of superintendent of lectures on fortification, afterward 

 appointed to deliver a course of lectures on analysis, Fourier has left 

 there a venerated name, and the reputation of a professor distinguished 

 by clearness, method, and erudition ; I shall add even the reputation of 

 a professor full of grace, for our colleague has proved that this kind of 

 merit may not be foreign to the teaching of mathematics. 



The lectures of Fourier have not been collected together. The Jour- 

 nal of the Polytechnic School contains only one paper by him, a memoir 

 upon the '' Principle of virtual velocities." This memoir, which prob- 

 ably had served for the text of a leoture, show^s that the secret of our 

 celebrated professor's great success consisted in the combination of 

 abstract truths, of interesting applications, and of historical details 

 little known, and derived, a thing so rare in our days, from original 

 sources. 



We have now* arrived at the epoch when the peace of Leobeu brought 

 back to the metropolis the principal ornaments of our armies. Then 

 the professors and the pupils of the Polytechnic School had sometimes 

 the distinguished honor of sitting in their amphitheaters beside Gen- 

 erals Desaix and Bonaparte. Everything ir^dicated to them then an 



