SAW 
S A U 
Prance, in the department of the Gers, with 800 inhabitants; 
3 miles west of Lombes. 
SAUVEUR (Joseph), a French mathematician, was 
born at La Fleche in the year 1653. Till he was seven 
years old he was completely dumb, and even then the organs 
of speech were not so effectually developed, but that he was 
ever afterwards obliged to speak very slowly, in order to be 
intelligible. In early life he discovered a great turn for 
mechanics, and constructed a number of little machines. 
He was sent to the college of Jesuits for instruction in the 
classics and belles-lettres; but he could settle to nothing but 
arithmetic and geometry. He was designed for the church, 
and was sent to Paris to study philosophy and theology. 
but to these new departments of learning he devoted very 
little attention; nevertheless, in a single month he made 
himself master of the first six books of Euclid without the aid 
of a tutor, and entered upon other parts of the mathematics, 
for the study of which he felt a predominant bias. On ac¬ 
count of the impediment in his speech, he was advised to 
abandon all thoughts of the ecclesiastical profession, and to 
engage in that of medicine: but he determined to devote him¬ 
self entirely to his favourite science, and to acquire such an 
acquaintance with it, as to render himself independent, by 
teaching others. In this object he completely succeeded, 
and that so speedily, that at the age of twenty-three he 
had become a fashionable preceptor in mathematics, and 
had prince Eugeue for his pupil. In 1680 he was chosen 
to teach mathematics to the pages of the dauphiness, and in 
the following year he went to Chantilly, with another philo¬ 
sopher, to make experiments on the waters at that place, 
by which he gained much credit, and the patronage of the 
prince of Conde, who frequently had recourse to his talents, 
and bestowed upon him many marks of his favour. In 
1686 he was appointed mathematical professor in the royal 
college. During his visits to Chantilly, M. Sauveur con- 
ceived the design of writing a treatise on fortification, and 
in order that he might combine practice with theory, he 
went, in 1691, to the siege of Mons, and spent every day 
in the trenches. After the siege was over, he visited, with 
the same view, all the strong towns in Flanders, and on his 
return he was made mathematician to the court, with a 
pension for life. In 1696 he was admitted a member of 
the Academy of Sciences; and upon the promotion of M. 
Vauban to be a marshal of France in 1703, and his pro¬ 
ceeding to join the army, M. Sauveur was, on his recom- 
paendation, nominated by the king his successor in the 
office of examiner of the engineers, with a pension, which 
he enjoyed till his death, in 1716, at the age of 63. He 
was twice married, and had children by both wives; and 
by the last a son, who, like himself, was dumb for the first 
seven years of his life. M. Sauveur was of a kind and 
obliging disposition, and notwithstanding the celebrity to 
which he had attained, he preserved an humble deportment, 
and his original simplicity of manners. He used to lay it 
down as an axiom, that what one man could accomplish in 
mathematics, another might if he chose. M. Sauveur studied 
very closely the science of music. He introduced a new 
diction in music, and invented a new doctrine of sounds; 
and he was the first who discovered, by theory and expe¬ 
riment, the velocity of musical strings, and ascertained the 
spaces which they describe in their vibrations under all 
the circumstances of tension and dimensions. He invented 
the monochord and echometer. His writings on geome¬ 
trical, musical, and other subjects, are inserted in different 
volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences from 
1700 to 1716. 
Sauveur had proposed an expedient for a fixed pitch, 
or universal tone, to determine the basis of all tones in the 
general musical scale or system; but his own reasoning 
proves that there is no fixed tone in nature; and the very 
ingenious and very impracticable artifice by which he 
■tried to find an arbitrator, proves but too plainly how far 
hypotheses, or, if you will, the truths of speculation, are 
from the simple rules of practice. There is no sonorous 
707 
body which is not affected by the perpetual atmospherical 
changes. Wood contracts and expands by heat and cold; 
strings of all kinds lengthen and shorten by the same 
elements, whatever may be their tension. Even the pierres 
sonores , the sounding stones of China, must be affected, to 
a certain degree, in the open air, by the elements. 
M. Sauveur was the inventor of the term acoustics , which 
the Academie Royale adopted. In his “ System of Music,” 
he gives at once the rules for determining the ratios of sounds, 
and the notes which express them. 
He also invented a kind of chronomctrc. It was a 
particular pendulum, intended to determine with accuracy 
the time of every musical movement. The author proposed 
to the Academy several expedients for that purpose. Rousseau 
was of opinion that none of them would succeed. But 
Romieu of Montpellier, the rival of Tartini, in his “ Terzo 
Suono,” in a memoir read publicly at the academy of that 
city in 1751, says, that no one ever developed the nature of 
sound as Sauveur has done; and adds, “I have often 
realized what he has advanced on the subject; and I do not 
believe that his excellent discovery can ever be overthrown.” 
Sauveur gave in 1701, a general system of intervals, 
and its application to every other system, and to every in¬ 
strument of music. In 1707 he gave a general method for 
forming a tempered system of music, and the choice of that 
which ought to be followed. In 1711 he produced to the 
Academy a general table of tempered scales in music. “ But 
all the systems of temperament which the imagination can 
suggest, (says M. Laborde, or rather his guide, the abbe 
Roussier,) ought henceforth to be laid aside as useless, their 
absurdity having been pointed out in the ‘ Memoire sur la 
Mus. des Anciens;’ and as the twenty-one sounds, of 
which the octave is composed, have certain stations or ele¬ 
vations in the scale, it would be madness to try to substitute 
others arbitrarily; but in the time of Sauveur this truth 
was still unknown.” Laborde. 
SAUVEUR, St., a name of the well known fountains of 
mineral water in the south of France, department of the 
Upper Pyrenees, in the valley of Barrege, near Luz. 
SAUVEUR, St., a small town near the central part of 
France, in the department of the Yonne, with 1100 inha¬ 
bitants; 21 miles south-west of Auxerre. 
SAUVEUR, St., a small town in the east of France, in 
Burgundy, department of the Cote d’Or; 9 miles north of 
Auxonne. 
SAUVEUR, St., a small inland town in the south of the 
Netherlands, province of Hainault, with 1900 inhabitants. 
SAUVEUR, St., a small town in the south-east of France, 
in Dauphiny, department of the Isere. 
SAUVEUR, St., a small town in the east of France, in 
Burgundy, department of the Upper Saone. 
SAUVEUR LE VICOMTE, St., a small town of the 
north-west of France, in Normandy, department of La 
Manche. It stands on the small river Douve. Popula¬ 
tion 2800. 
SAUXILLANGE, a small town near the central part of 
France, department of the Puy de Dome. It has 2100 
inhabitants, employed partly in manufactures ; 6 miles east 
of Issoire, and 15 west of Ambert. 
SAW. The preterite of see. 
SAW, s. A blade of steel, with a notched edge, used to 
cut through wood or other matters, by attrition.—Then 
saws were toothed, and sounding axles made. Drj/den. 
—[from Saga, Sax.] A saying or proverb. 
From the table of my memory 
I’ll wipe away all saws of books. Shakspeare. 
The saw is one of the most useful machines, in the me¬ 
chanic arts, ever invented. The fable, which is perhaps 
founded on some surer tradition, attributes the invention of 
it to Icarus, who, vying with his father Daedalus, enriched 
the rising arts with several discoveries. It is added he took 
the first hint from the spine or back-bone of a flat fish, such 
as the soal. The saw is made of steel, with teeth ; but those 
differently 
