sition, and have found
the DOOR which leads to everything. Which will be a comfort to you;
still looking vainly for the key, if there is still no key conceivable.

Perpetual President Maupertuis, having surprised Nature in this manner,
read Papers upon it to an Academy listening with upturned eyes; new
Papers, perfected out of old,--for he has long been hatching these
Phoenix-eggs; and has sent them out complete, quite lately, in a little
Book called COSMOLOGIE, where alone I have had the questionable benefit
of reading them. Grandly brief, as if coming from Delphi, the utterance
is; loftily solemn, elaborately modest, abstruse to the now human mind;
but intelligible, had it only been worth understanding:--a painful
little Book, that COSMOLOGIE, as the Perpetual President's generally
are. "Minimum of Action, LOI D'EPARGNE, Law of Thrift," he calls this
sublime Discovery;--thinks it will be Sovereign in Natural Theology
as well: "For how could Nature be a Save-all, without Designer
present?"--and speaks, of course, among other technical points, about
"VIS VIVA, or Velocity multiplied by the Square of the Time:" which two
points, "LOI D'EPARGNE," and that "the VIS VIVA is always a Minimum,"
the reader can take along with him; I will permit him to shake the
others into Limbo again, as forgettable by human nature at this epoch
and henceforth.

In La Beaumelle's--Vie de Maupertuis--(printed at last, Paris, 1856,
after lying nearly a century in manuscript, an obtuse worthless leaden
little Book), there is much loud droning and detailing, about this
COSMOLOGIE, this sublime "Discovery," and the other sublime Discoveries,
Insights and Apocalyptic Utterances of Maupertuis; though in so confused
a fashion, it is seldom you can have the poor pleasure of learning
exactly when, or except by your own severe scrutiny, exactly what. For
reasons that will appear, certain of those Apocalyptic Utterances by
Perpetual President Maupertuis have since got a new interest, and one
has actually a kind of wish to read the IPSISSIMA VERBA of them, at
this date! But in La Beaumelle (his modern Editor lying fast asleep
throughout) there is no vestige of help. Nay Maupertuis's own Book,
[--OEuvres de Maupertuis,--Lyon, 1756, 4 vols. 4to.] luxurious
cream-paper Quartos, or Octaves made four-square by margin,--which you
buy for these and the cognate objects,--proves altogether worthless
to you. The Maupertuis Quartos are not readable for their own sa