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upon that stereotyped course of training which has been famous 
for the nurture of so many Frenchmen of genius. At the age of 
/ 
sixteen he entered the Ecole Polytechnique, and on leaving it in 
1827 was classed as an engineer in the Department of Eoads and 
Bridges. After two years he forsook engineering for the cultivation 
of the higher mathematics. He speedily distinguished himself in 
his chosen career; for as early as 1829 we find a paper of his 
(“Demonstration d’un Theoreme d’^Dctricite Dynamique”) in the 
Annales de Cliimie et de Physique; and in 1831 he became a 
repetiteur, and seven years later a professor, in the Polytechnic 
School. In the interval he had performed perhaps his greatest 
service to his favourite science by starting in 1836 The Journal 
de Mathematiques Pares et Appliquees. This journal came most 
opportunely to fill the gap left by the discontinuance of the Annales 
de Gergonne ; but it could scarcely have attained its brilliant success 
had it not been for the many excellent qualities of its editor, whose 
critical discernment, that enabled him to enter so readily into the 
spirit of the works of other mathematicians, and to assist at the 
dehut of so many men of distinction, — whose amiability, candour, 
and freedom from national prejudice, 1 — whose own inexhaustible 
powers as a contributor of original memoirs, all combined to fit him 
uniquely for the post which he filled so admirably for nearly forty 
years. 
In 1839 Liouville was elected a member of the Academy of 
Sciences in succession to Lalande, and the year following he was 
put upon the Board of Longitude, in whose proceedings he took a 
lively interest to the end of his life. In 1852 he became a pro- 
fessor in the College de France, and continued to lecture in that 
capacity until about a year before his death. 
If we except his continually recurring successes as a teacher and 
as an investigator in the most recondite of all the sciences, and the 
honours accorded to him by the scientific world in token of their 
appreciation, Liouville’s public career was uneventful, as the career 
of a devoted man of science usually is. On one occasion, however, 
he departed from the “even tenor of his way.” In 1848, a year 
of much tribulation for France, he received a flattering mark of 
widely spread popular esteem by being elected a member of the 
“ Constituent Assembly.” He promptly answered this call of 
