; but this circumstance did
not prevent his former masters from appointing him to the principal
chair of mathematics in the Military School of Auxerre, and bestowing
upon him numerous tokens of a lively and sincere affection. I venture to
assert that no event in the life of our colleague affords a more
striking proof of the goodness of his natural disposition and the
amiability of his manners. It would be necessary not to know the human
heart to suppose that the monks of St. Benoit did not feel some chagrin
upon finding themselves so abruptly abandoned, to imagine especially
that they should give up without lively regret the glory which the order
might have expected from the ingenious colleague who had just escaped
from them.

Fourier responded worthily to the confidence of which he had just become
the object. When his colleagues were indisposed, the titular professor
of mathematics occupied in turns the chairs of rhetoric, of history, and
of philosophy; and whatever might be the subject of his lectures, he
diffused among an audience which listened to him with delight, the
treasures of a varied and profound erudition, adorned with all the
brilliancy which the most elegant diction could impart to them.

MEMOIR ON THE RESOLUTION OF NUMERICAL EQUATIONS.

About the close of the year 1789 Fourier repaired to Paris and read
before the Academy of Sciences a memoir on the resolution of numerical
equations of all degrees. This work of his early youth our colleague, so
to speak, never lost sight of. He explained it at Paris to the pupils of
the Polytechnic School; he developed it upon the banks of the Nile in
presence of the Institute of Egypt; at Grenoble, from the year 1802, it
was his favourite subject of conversation with the Professors of the
Central School and of the Faculty of Sciences; this finally, contained
the elements of the work which Fourier was engaged in seeing through the
press when death put an end to his career.

A scientific subject does not occupy so much space in the life of a man
of science of the first rank without being important and difficult. The
subject of algebraic analysis above mentioned, which Fourier had studied
with a perseverance so remarkable, is not an exception to this rule. It
offers itself in a great number of applications of calculation to the
movements of the heavenly bodies, or to the physics of terrestrial
bodies, and in general in the problems which lead to equations of a high