JOSEPH FOURIER. 



BIOGRAI'HY READ AT A PUBLIC ASSEMBLY OF THE ACADEMY OF 

 SCIENCES, ON THE 1STH OF NOA T EMBER, 1833. 



GENTLEMEN, 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 laborious 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 



