HISTORICAL SKETCH 



OF THE 



ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF PARIS. 



By M. FLOURENS, 



PERPETUAL SECRETARY, ETC. TRANSLATED FOR THE SMITHSOMAX INSTITU- 

 TION, BY C. A. ALEXANDER. 



The Academy of Sciences of Paris was established in 1666, at a time when 

 Italy had already seen the rise and fall of its Academy of the Lyncci, (founded 

 at Rome in 1603, by the Prince Cesi, and extinct after his death,) and could 

 still boast its Academy del Civicnto, founded at Florence in 1651. Germany, 

 too, had its Academy Natiirm Curiosorum, founded in 1652, and England itp 

 Royal Society, deiinitely established in 1660, but existing for some time pre- 

 vious. In the order of legal date, therefore, our own Academy is but the fifth, 

 yet had it existed in a free or private form before it received a regular organi- 

 zation b>j order of the King. As a few men of letters, meeting in 1629 alt the 

 private residence of Courart, "without noise or pomp," as Pelisson tells us. 

 "and solely with a view to the pleasures of intellectual association and a rational 

 life," laid the foundation of the French Academy, (formally organized by Car- 

 dinal Richelieu, in 1635,) so the Academy of Sciences commenced in the 

 assembling of a small company of savants at the houses, first of Monmor, and 

 afterwards of Thevenot and Bourdelot. Here experiments and new discoveries 

 were examined, and hither, as these meetings soon became celebrated, learned 

 foreigners resorted ; here the Italian Boccone presented his observations on the 

 coral and shells of Sicily, and the Danish Stenon, a man of genius and an 

 anatomist and geologist of great penetration, read his ingenious discourse on the 

 anatomy of the brain. 



"It is perhaps these assemblages of Paris," says Fontenelle, "which have 

 given rise to many of the academies in the rest of Europe. It is, at any rate, 

 certain," he adds, "that the English gentlemen who laid the first foundations of 

 the Royal Society of London had travelled in France and been received in the 

 houses of MM. Monmor and Thevenot." 



I cite these words of Fontenelle without attaching to them, as may well be 

 believed, too much importance. Dating from the middle of the seventeenth 

 century, a new taste in philosophy had spread itself almost everywhere, and 

 had as generally given rise to Academies.* As soon as the learned world began 

 to grow weary of scholastics, that philosophy of words which had so long hin- 

 dorcd it from perceiving t\w j>hilosophy of things, (we owe these designations to 

 Fontenelle,) as soon as it became tired of studying nature only in the ancients, 

 ;i3id chose to study nature herself. Academies sprung into existence. 



Academies are the offspring of the intellectual spirit of moden;^ times. This 

 modern spirit dates from Bacon, Galileo, Descartes ; it is propagated through 



'Amonj^ those of the above mentioned and the succeeding; century the academy of Berlin 

 dates from the year 1700; those of St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Madrid, «&jj., 

 belong to the commencement of the eighteenth century. 

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