452 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



barsette" in his capacity of <( mathematician to the 

 Court" found himself abruptly invited into the closet of 

 his irate sovereign, and given distinctly to understand that 

 the royal prerogative included secrets of that sort, and 

 that kings were not to be left subject to the run of luck 

 ordained to common people. "What was the Royal 

 Academy for, if" etc., etc.? 



Every one knows how Louis went to the wars, dragging 

 poor Racine from his theatre to write history as he made 

 it, and Perrault and Roemer and Mariotte and Blondel, 

 regardless of the fact that some were mathematicians and 

 others astronomers, to study bombs and ballistics. It was 

 sufficient for Louis that they were all scientific persons. 

 About the only philosopher of eminence whom he let 

 alone was Cassini, and that because the astronomical 

 observations in progress were useful for the Navy. It is 

 perhaps not altogether surprising that in these circum- 

 stances the Academy, as one of its historians remarks, 

 "lost its lustre and fell into a languor." There it re- 

 mained until De Ponchartrain reorganized it in 1699, 

 mainly after the bureaucratic system, so dear to the Gallic 

 heart, and with such singular astuteness that it at once 

 provided a variety of new offices for hangers-on of the 

 Court. Thus inspired with new life, it proceeded to dis- 

 pute the Newtonian theories for the next half century, and 

 patriotically stuck to Descartes and his vortices long after 

 they had become abandoned by Holland, Germany and 

 St. Petersburg. 1 



All of this accounts for the fact that one may turn over 

 the pages of the ten volumes of Anciens Memoirs before 

 noted yes, and those of many of the later tomes of the 

 Histoire de 1'Academie Royale and find little or nothing 

 to show that French philosophy had ever heard of the dis- 

 coveries of Boyle or Hooke, or even of the German, Von 

 Guericke. Yet in that (to us) dreary waste of antiquated 

 natural history, anatomy and mathematics, there may be 



'Maury: L'Aucienne Academic des Sciences. Paris, 1864. 



