INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 173 
Turis BIoGRAPHY WAS READ AT THE Pusiic MEETING OF 
THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES ON THE 26TH OF JULY, 
1830. 
Gentlemen,—* There are men who may be succeeded, 
but whom no one can replace.” These words of one of 
the most honoured writers of our time, so often reproduced 
as the conventional formula on occasions like the present, 
are to-day in my mouth the faithful expression of what I 
feel. How could I, indeed, without the deepest emotion, 
now occupy before this tribunal a place which has been 
so worthily filled, during eight years, by the illustrious 
geometer whose unexpected death has been a source of 
no less regret to friendship, than to science and to letters. 
It is not here, Gentlemen, for the first time that this 
sincere avowal of my well-founded diffidence has been 
heard. Nearly all the members of the Academy have in 
turn been the confidants of my scruples, and their encour- 
ing kindness had scarcely succeeded in surmounting 
them. Devoted for a long time past to purely scientific 
researches, entirely destitute of the Wterary claims, which 
up to this moment had appeared indispensable in the dif- 
ficult functions which were confided to me, I could only 
possess in the eyes of the Academy the slight merit of 
continued zeal, of unlimited devotion to its interests, of 
an ardent desire manifested on all occasions to see the 
renown which it had acquired enlarge, if that were pos- 
sible, and extend itself in all quarters. The void which 
M. Fourier has left among us (as I was the first to 
acknowledge, and I acknowledged it without reserve) will 
be especially felt in these solemn meetings; it is then 
that you will recall to mind that language in which the 
most rigorous precision was so happily allied with ele- 
