4 Biographical Notice of the Abbi Hauy. 



tended. It may readily be conceived that Daubenton was 

 eager to accept and to make known such valuable labours. 

 M. de Laplace, to whom he communicated them, hastened to 

 encourage the author to bring them before the Academy of 

 Sciences. But it was not easy to induce the modest Hauy to 

 leave his happy obscurity to show himself at the house where 

 the Academy held its sittings, and in the midst of this society 

 of distinguished men. He yielded, however, to the solicita- 

 tion, and went to the house as to an ecclesiastical ceremony, 

 clothed with the costume prescribed by the canons. It was 

 found necessary to have recourse to the authority of a doctor 

 of the Sorbonne, to persuade him that he might, with a safe 

 conscience, wear the same garb as the other ecclesiastics of that 

 day. It is probable, however, that the Academy would have 

 received him, whatever dress he might have chosen to appear 

 in. On the 12th of February 1783, he was admitted as an 

 adjunct in the class of Botany. 



In the prosecution of the new views which Hauy had 

 adopted respecting the structure of crystals, he was led to pay 

 particular attention to the physical properties of minerals. 

 The developement of electricity by heating the tourmaline, 

 which had been discovered by Lemery, attracted his particu- 

 lar notice ; and he was led to the discovery of the same pro- 

 perty in the siliceous oxide of zinc, in boracite, in mesotype, 

 prehnite, and sphene. So early as 1785, he published, in the 

 Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, his observations on the 

 pyro-electricity of tourmaline, and in the same volume he an- 

 nounced his discovery of the pyro-electricity of the oxide of 

 zinc, which is the more remarkable, as it belongs to the class 

 of metallic substances. His attention having been thus par- 

 ticularly directed to the subject of electricity, he published, 

 in the year 1787, his first separate work, in 1 vol. 8vo., en- 

 titled, Exposition Raisonnee de la Theorie de V Electricite et 

 du Magnetisme, d^apres les Principes de M. JEpinus. The 

 work of M. JEpinus, in which this theory first appeared, was 

 published at St Petersburg in 1760, under the title of Ten- 

 tamen Theoriw Electricitatis et Magnetismi, and was the first 

 successful attempt to generalize the phenomena of these two 

 interesting branches of science. Although the original work 



