HY READ AT A PUBLIC ASSEMBLY OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ON THE
18TH OF NOVEMBER, 1833.

Gentlemen,--In former times one academician differed from another only
in the number, the nature, and the brilliancy of his discoveries. Their
lives, thrown in some respects into the same mould, consisted of events
little worthy of remark. A boyhood more or less studious; progress
sometimes slow, sometimes rapid; inclinations thwarted by capricious or
shortsighted parents; inadequacy of means, the privations which it
introduces in its train; thirty years of a laborious professorship and
difficult studies,--such were the elements from which the admirable
talents of the early secretaries of the Academy were enabled to execute
those portraits, so piquant, so lively, and so varied, which form one of
the principal ornaments of your learned collections.

In the present day, biographies are less confined in their object. The
convulsions which France has experienced in emancipating herself from
the swaddling-clothes of routine, of superstition and of privilege, have
cast into the storms of political life citizens of all ages, of all
conditions, and of all characters. Thus has the Academy of Sciences
figured during forty years in the devouring arena, wherein might and
right have alternately seized the supreme power by a glorious sacrifice
of combatants and victims!

Recall to mind, for example, the immortal National Assembly. You will
find at its head a modest academician, a patern of all the private
virtues, the unfortunate Bailly, who, in the different phases of his
political life, knew how to reconcile a passionate affection for his
country with a moderation which his most cruel enemies themselves have
been compelled to admire.

When, at a later period, coalesced Europe launched against France a
million of soldiers; when it became necessary to organize for the crisis
fourteen armies, it was the ingenious author of the _Essai sur les
Machines_ and of the _Geometrie des Positions_ who directed this
gigantic operation. It was, again, Carnot, our honourable colleague, who
presided over the incomparable campaign of seventeen months, during
which French troops, novices in the profession of arms, gained eight
pitched battles, were victorious in one hundred and forty combats,
occupied one hundred and sixteen fortified places and two hundred and
thirty forts or redoubts, enriched our arsenals with four thousand
cannon and seventy thousand mu