194 Life of Count Rumford. 



cants, he had recognized the advantage to be gained by 

 giving permanency to some temporary provisions which 

 he had then felt to be necessary. He formed and ma- 

 tured a plan to facilitate a military patrol of the whole 

 country. This required permanent stations for sol- 

 diers, and, in order that the soldiers should not be 

 idle, he proposed to keep them employed on the repair 

 of roads and highways, and also to provide for them 

 comfortable tenements at their stations, so that they 

 need not levy contributions of food and forage upon 

 the inhabitants. This scheme, as its author devised it, 

 included the opening and improving of military roads, 

 with distances carefully marked by milestones, and the 

 planting of trees on the sides. Very little was done 

 towards carrying out this proposition. 



Leaving out of view the philosophical science which 

 undoubtedly, like a conscious or unconscious subsid- 

 iary motive, excited and aided the Count in all these 

 comprehensive plans of beneficence, we must certainly 

 regard them in their sum and effect as equalling the 

 results accomplished by any other single benefactor of 

 mankind. It is indeed hard to believe of him, as not 

 only Cuvier but others have said, that he really did not 

 love his fellow-men. Cuvier, in recognizing the scien- 

 tific passion and the social distinction which aided and 

 rewarded the benevolent and economical labors of Count 

 Rumford, applies to him in pleasantry what Fontenelle 

 said of Dodard, who, in his rigid observance of the 

 fasts of the church, turned the process into a means of 

 scientific experiment on the effects of abstinence and 

 asceticism on himself, that he was the first man who 

 took the same path for getting into heaven and into 

 the French Academy. 



