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1815.] Charles Bossut. 407 
the diminution of which he exaggerated, he was not very anxious to 
point out the merit of contemporaries, whom he thought in general 
unfavourably disposed towards himself. We find the effect of these 
opinions in a very bad-humoured preface to his Mathematical Me- 
moirs, published in 1812. These memoirs are those which had 
ined prizes, and been published at the time by the Academy of 
Bence. He adds to them some notes on his History of Mathe- 
matics. He there explains or demonstrates theorems which he had 
too much abridged ; but he adds nothing to fill up the blanks which 
had excited the outeries of which he was so sensible. 
We must lament that he was so long the dupe of a cloudy 
imagination, which rendered the last years of his life unhappy. 
Before age, infirmities, and the loss of his places, had laid open 
this disposition to misanthropy, he appeared to us to be filled with 
benevolence. I shall always recollect with gratitude the notice 
which he paid as Director of the Academy of Sciences to the first 
essays which I presented to that body ; and yet he knew that 1 was 
particularly connected with an astronomer whose friend he was not, 
and of whom he must have considered me to be the pupil and 
protegé. I may add that I never found the least change in his 
disposition towards me, though I ventured to express an opinion 
opposite to his with regard to some points of ancient astronomy. — 
We may place his omissions in a more favourable point of view, 
though we cannot pretend to excuse them entirely. A great work 
on transcendental mathematics is not read with the same facility as 
a work of history or literature. ‘To understand its merit, to be able 
to explain its plan, and to point out the most interesting parts of it, 
a degree of labour and attention is requisite of which old age is no 
longer capable. A mathematician possessed of the true genius of 
invention may astonish us by new productions at an advanced period 
of life. ‘These productions will be the developements of former 
ideas, to draw the consequences from which no opportunity had 
previously occurred. But he would be terrified at the thoughts of 
following for a long time the steps of another mathematician. It 
was in town that Lagrange composed his last works, and at the same 
time he avowed the necessity of going to the country to form an 
exact idea of the new methods of M. Gauss. 
Bossut wished to be just and impartial ; and he wished it in con- 
sequence of that harshness of character of which he accuses him- 
self, and of which he had given numerous proofs. We shall only 
notice one. 
At the time that he was Examiner of Engineers, the Comte de 
Muy, at that time Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost, 
and Governor of the Province, and afterwards Marshal of France 
and Minister at War, had personally recommended to him a 
number of pupils, who, by a singular fatality, were almost never 
worthy of being admitted, and who were in fact rejected, ‘The 
Comte de Muy had expressed some dissatisfaction at this. When 
afterwards he became Minister at War, and when, according to the 
