JOSEPH FOURIER. 
BIOGRAPHY READ AT A PUBLIC ASSEMBLY OF THE ACADEMY OF 
SCIENCES, ON THE 18TH OF NOVEMBER, 1838. 
GrNTLEMEN,—In former times one academician dif- 
fered from another only in the number, the nature, and 
the brilliancy of his discoveries. Their lives, thrown in 
some respects into the same mould, consisted of events 
little worthy of remark. A boyhood more or less studi- 
ous; progress sometimes slow, sometimes rapid; incli- 
nations thwarted by capricious or shortsighted parents ; 
inadequacy of means, the privations which it introduces 
in its train; thirty years of a laberious professorship and 
difficult studies,—such were the elements from which the 
admirable talents of the early secretaries of the Academy 
were enabled to execute those portraits, so piquant, so 
lively, and so varied, which form one of the principal 
ornaments of your learned collections. 
In the present day, biographies are less confined in 
their object. The convulsions which France has expe- 
rienced in emancipating herself from the swaddling- 
clothes of routine, of superstition and of privilege, have 
cast into the storms of political life citizens of all ages, 
of all conditions, and of all characters. Thus has the 
Academy of Sciences figured during forty years in the — 
