skets, took a hundred thousand prisoners,
and adorned the dome of the Invalides with ninety flags. During the same
time the Chaptals, the Fourcroys, the Monges, the Berthollets rushed
also to the defence of French independence, some of them extracting from
our soil, by prodigies of industry, the very last atoms of saltpetre
which it contained; others transforming, by the aid of new and rapid
methods, the bells of the towns, villages, and smallest hamlets into a
formidable artillery, which our enemies supposed, as indeed they had a
right to suppose, we were deprived of. At the voice of his country in
danger, another academician, the young and learned Meunier, readily
renounced the seductive pursuits of the laboratory; he went to
distinguish himself upon the ramparts of Koenigstein, to contribute as a
hero to the long defence of Mayence, and met his death, at the age of
forty years only, after having attained the highest position in a
garrison wherein shone the Aubert-Dubayets, the Beaupuys, the Haxos, the
Klebers.

How could I forget here the last secretary of the original Academy?
Follow him into a celebrated Assembly, into that Convention, the
sanguinary delirium of which we might almost be inclined to pardon, when
we call to mind how gloriously terrible it was to the enemies of our
independence, and you will always see the illustrious Condorcet occupied
exclusively with the great interests of reason and humanity. You will
hear him denounce the shameful brigandage which for two centuries laid
waste the African continent by a system of corruption; demand in a tone
of profound conviction that the Code be purified of the frightful stain
of capital punishment, which renders the error of the judge for ever
irreparable. He is the official organ of the Assembly on every occasion
when it is necessary to address soldiers, citizens, political parties,
or foreign nations in language worthy of France; he is not the tactician
of any party, he incessantly entreats all of them to occupy their
attention less with their own interests and a little more with public
matters; he replies, finally, to unjust reproaches of weakness by acts
which leave him the only alternative of the poison cup or the scaffold.

The French Revolution thus threw the learned geometer, whose discoveries
I am about to celebrate, far away from the route which destiny appeared
to have traced out for him. In ordinary times it would be about Dom[40]
Joseph Fourier th