November 14, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



689 



the Academy which Merz so justly empha- 

 sizes. With such members as Lagrange, 

 Laplace, Legendre and Cauchy in mathe- 

 matics; Messier, Arago, Lalande and Del- 

 ambre in astronomy; Biot, Ampere, 

 Fourier, Presnel, Beequerel and Eegnault 

 in physics ; Berthollet, Gay-Lussae, Dulong, 

 Dumas and Chevreul in chemistry; Cuvier, 

 de Jussieu, Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint- 

 Hilaire in biology, and with others equally 

 celebrated in other fields, it is not sur- 

 prising that the Academy commanded the 

 respect and the admiration of the civilized 

 world. 



Some of the elements which have entered 

 into the success of the Paris Academy are 

 not difScult to recognize: The sympathy 

 and support of such statesmen as Colbert 

 and Napoleon, who appreciated the funda- 

 mental importance of science to the nation, 

 as Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies 

 had done before them; the cooperative 

 spirit which led the members to work to- 

 gether for a common cause; the perfection 

 in the hands of the academicians of the 

 powerful mathematical methods which con- 

 tributed so largely to the application and 

 widespread usefulness of Newton's dis- 

 coveries; and the popularization of science 

 and the diffusion of the scientific spirit 

 through the brilliant writings of Cuvier, 

 Laplace, Buffon, Fontenelle and many 

 others. Far from disdaining the transla- 

 tion of technical papers into attractive 

 literature, these great leaders set an exam- 

 ple which was followed hardly less effec- 

 tively, though in a different manner, by 

 Davy and Faraday at the Royal Institu- 

 tion. Cuvier, above all others, represented 

 the academic system at its best. In his 

 eloquent Eloges on the most eminent scien- 

 tific men of the day, he paints a picture of 

 scientific investigation and progress with 

 the hand of a practised artist. The wide 

 field of science, and the rich results flowing 



from the labors of investigators skilled in 

 many departments of knowledge, has never 

 been more admirably depicted than in the 

 discourses of this distinguished perpetual 

 secretary.^^ 



In Germany, the division of the empire 

 into many kingdoms, preventing the cen- 

 tralization which has been so important a 

 factor in France and England, and the pre- 

 vailing influence of the universities as re- 

 search laboratories, where every teacher is 

 not only a scholar but a productive inves- 

 tigator, have stood in the way of the devel- 

 opment of any such national institution as 

 the Paris Academy of Sciences. 



During the eighteenth century the great 

 men of science, including Leibnitz, Euler, 

 Haller, Tobias Mayer, Lambert, Olbers and 

 Alexander von Humboldt, were widely 

 scattered, and in most eases had little to do 

 with the universities, although these were 

 already distinguished for classical scholar- 

 ship. But by the publication of his "Dis- 

 quisitiones Arithmetieas, " and the inven- 

 tion of his improved method of calculating 

 planetary orbits. Gauss, of the University 

 of Gottingen, placed himself on a level 

 with the great French mathematicians and 

 inaugurated a new era in German science. 

 By the use of this method, von Zaeh and 

 Olbers were enabled to recover the first of 

 the minor planets, Ceres, which had been 

 lost on its approach to the sun. Gauss also 

 introduced exact science into the university 

 curriculum, but it was through the work of 

 Jacobi that the great school of German 

 mathematicians was set on foot a quarter 

 of a century later. The contemporary 



28 For the data used in this account of the 

 Paris Academy I am largely indebted to the 

 work of Maury, Simon, Merz and Hippeau, al- 

 ready cited, and especially to the article by Dar- 

 boux in "L'Institut de France," Vol. 2 (Paris, 

 1907). See also the useful series of articles by 

 Dr. E. F. Williams on the Paris, Berlin and 

 Vienna Academies in the Popular Science Monthly. 



