346 ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF PARIS. 



following portraiture of the savants who illustrated by their genius the first 

 half of the seventeenth century is an instance: "In Italy, Galileo, mathema- 

 tician to the grand duke, at the commencement of that century first observed 

 the spots on the sun. He discovered the satellites of Jupiter, the phases of 

 Venus, the small stars which compose the milky way, and, what is still more 

 considerable, the instrument of which he availed himself to discover them. 

 Torricelli, his disciple and successor, devised the famous experiment of the 

 vacuum, which has led the way to an infinitude of entirely new phenomena. 

 Cavallerius detected the ingenious and subtle geometry of indivisibles which is 

 now extended so far, and which, at every moment, embraces the infinite. In 

 France, Descartes opened to geometers new paths which had not been before 

 known, and disclosed to physicists a multitude of views which either suffice of 

 themselves or prepare the way for others. In England, Baron Napier distin- 

 guished himself by the invention of logarithms ; and Harvey by the discovery, 

 or, at least, the incontestable proof of the circulation of the blood. The honor 

 which accrued to the whole English nation from this new system of Harvey 

 seems to have turned the attention of the English to anatomy. Several of 

 them ado^ited particular parts of the body as the subject of their researches — 

 Wharton, the glands ; Glisson, the liver ; Willis, the bi'ain and the nerves ; 

 Lower, the heart and its movements. About the same time, the reservoir of 

 the chyle and the thoracic duct were discovered by Pecquet, a Frenchman, 

 and the lymphatic vessels by Thomas Bartholin, a Dane, to say nothing of the 

 salivary ducts which Stenon, another Dane, taught us to knoAV still more 

 exactly than Wharton had done, nor of all Avhich Marcel ]\Ialpiglii, an Italian 

 and first physician to Pope Innocent XII, observed in the epiploon, in tho 

 heart and in the brain, anatomical discoveries which, however important, will 

 yet yield him less honor than his happy conception of extending anatomy even 

 to ])lants. In fine, all the sciences and all the arts whose progress had been 

 arrested for centuries, acquired, in this, new forces, and commenced, so to speak, 

 a new career." — Preface (jflGGb . 



Fontenelle portrays himself in his Elogc of Duhamel, that first secretary of 

 the Academy of Sciences whom he has caused us to forget : " There was required 

 for this association a secretary who xxnderstood and could competently speak 

 all the different languages of these savants ; who might be their common inter- 

 preter with the public ; who could not only throw light on so many intricate 

 and abstract topics, but give them a certain turn and even grace which authors 

 sometimes neglect, and which yet the greater part of readers desire; one, in 

 fine, who, by his character, should be exempt from partiality, and qualified to 

 render a disinterested account of the academic contests. The choice of M. 

 Colbert for this functionary fell upon M. Duhamel." It is in this same Eloge 

 that we meet with this ingenious remark : " That which ought not to be embel- 

 lished beyond a certain determinate point is precisely what it costs most pains 

 to embellish;" and nothing could better characterize the writer's own felicitous 

 manner and discriminating art. 



I have already cited more than once the two prefaces which precede the 

 histories of the years 1G66 and 1699. The latter, on its first appearance, 

 excited attention, not only in France, but in Europe. Not since the disconrsi 

 of Descartes on method had there been heard such language applied to such 

 objects. The admiration was universal. The preface of 1666 had a different 

 fate. In the first place, it did not appear until several years later ; and then, when 

 it did appear, it attracted scarcely any notice. Trublet tells us that in his time it 

 was almost unknown. "Many persons," he says, "have the history of the 

 Academy of Sciences since 1699, and buy the new volumes as they issue from 

 the press. Very few have had the curiosity to go back to 1666, or even know 

 that M, de Fontenelle had labored on the first memoirs and composed the his- 

 tory of the first years of the Academy." Garat, in his Eloge of Fontenelle, 



