Notes on the Life of Arago. 63 



Observatory for so many years. The government, however, 

 made an exception in his favour, and Arago remained to his 

 last breath Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. 

 In this emergency he addressed the following noble letter 

 to the Minister of Public Instruction ; and it had the happy 

 effect of changing the decision of the Emperor, who allowed 

 him to retain both his offices : — 



u Paris, May 9, 1852. 



" Monsieur le Ministre, — The government has itself ad- 

 mitted that the oath prescribed by Art. 14 of the Constitu- 

 tion ought not to be required from the members of a purely 

 scientific and literary body like the Institute. I cannot see 

 why the Bureau des Longitudes, an astronomical academy in 

 which, when a vacancy occurs, an election ensues to fill it 

 up, is placed in another category. This simple circumstance 

 would perhaps have sufficed to induce me to refuse the oath, 

 but considerations of another nature, I confess, have exer- 

 cised a decisive influence on my mind. Circumstances ren- 

 dered me, in 1848, as member of the Provisional Govern- 

 ment, one of the founders of the Republic. As such, and I 

 glory in it at present, I contributed to the abolition of all 

 political oaths. At a later period I was named by the Con- 

 stituent Assembly president of the Executive Committee ; my 

 acts in this last-named situation are too well known to the 

 public for me to have need to mention them here. You can 

 comprehend, Monsieur le Ministre, that in presence of these 

 reminiscences my conscience has imposed on me a resolution 

 which perhaps the Director of the Observatory would have 

 hesitated to come to. I had always thought that, by the 

 terms of the law, an astronomer at the Bureau of Longitude 

 was appointed for life, but your decision has undeceived me. 

 I have therefore, Monsieur le Ministre, to request you to 

 appoint a day on which I shall have to quit an establishment 

 which I have been inhabiting now for near half a century. 

 That establisment, thanks to the protection given to it by 

 the Governments which have succeeded each other in France 

 for the last 40 years, — thanks, above all, I may be allowed 

 to say, to the kindness of the Legislative Assemblies in re- 



