ged the
child, and made provision for its support. The habits of foreign life
are generally so scandalous, that they can scarcely be alluded to
without offending our sense of delicacy. The mother of this infant was
an unmarried woman, living in the very highest circles of Paris, the
sister of Cardinal Tencin, archbishop of Lyons. This woman thus added to
her vice the cruelty of exposing her unfortunate offspring to die of
cold and hunger in the streets. It does not appear that her profligacy,
though notorious, ever affected her position in society. Her coteries
were as gay, her circle was as complete, and her rank as high, as ever.
In the Paris of those days, "throwing the first stone" was unheard of;
its reaction would have been an avalanche; there was no scandal where
there was no concealment; there was no crime where there was no
conscience; and thus danced the world away, until the scourge of a
higher power swept the whole noblesse of France into beggary and exile.

D'Alembert seems to have taken his surname from that of his nurse, and
was sent, when twelve years old, to the College of La Nation, then in
the possession of the Jansenists. There he learned mathematics. On
leaving the college, he returned to the glazier's house, there had one
room for his bedroom and study, lived on the family fare, supported
himself on a pension of L50 a-year left to him by his father, and in
that house lived for forty years. He once made an abortive attempt to
study the law and medicine, but soon grew weary of both, and returned to
mathematics, for which he had a decided predilection. His application to
this study, however, by no means pleased the homely sense of his old
nurse. "You will never be any thing better than a philosopher," was her
usual saying. "And what's a philosopher?--a fool, who wears out his
life, to be spoken of after he is dead."

But D'Alembert had evidently a passion for science; and in his
twenty-third year he sent to the Academy of Sciences an analytical
paper, which attracted general notice. This was followed by his
admission into the society, at the unusually early age of twenty-four.
From this period, he proceeded for eighteen years, constantly furnishing
the Academy with papers, which added greatly to its reputation and his
own. In a note on the presumed discovery of Taylor's Theorem by
D'Alembert, the noble biographer alludes to what he regards as a similar
event, the discovery of the "Binomial Theorem" b