CHAPTER XIV.

FOUR years after the foundation of the English Royal Society, Colbert, the astute and far-seeing minister of Louis XIV, perceived in the gatherings of philosophers which were still held at the houses of Thevenot and others, the possible nucleus of a great national institution, capable of advancing science and the industries of France. The Royal Academy of Sciences was therefore duly established by royal command in 1666, and with princely generosity, intended to be in marked contrast with what English Charles did not do, Louis endowed the new body with ample funds for its future experiments, and added pensions and rewards for deserving members. Thus equipped, the philosophers had nothing to do but startle the world with the magnitude and originality of their discoveries, to the making of which they might now devote themselves without troubling as to cost.

At first they proceeded slowly. The original members were chiefly mathematicians, and experiments can hardly be said to have begun until the physicists were admitted. Then they went at it with a will. They experimented in concert, with results fully equal to such as might reasonably be expected to follow the production of Shakespeare's tragedy with a chorus of simultaneous-if not concordant -Hamlets. There was no gathering in a room and reading one another asleep with interminable papers, suitable only for the phlegmatic plodding English. The sessions were held in the laboratory. Nature should be made to yield up her secrets by the combined efforts of several brains attacking her stronghold simultaneously, like the concentrated fire of a battery. They needed no Charles to suggest subjects and spur them on. Indeed, when Louis

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the Magnificent and Monsieur the Dauphin and le Grand Condé, attended by a gorgeous retinue, came in state to visit them, it was the king himself who, after intrepidly withstanding several chemical lectures, remarked that he had "no need to exhort them to work, for they were doing it enough for themselves."

So they kept on experimenting manfully, and quarrelling fiercely; and their activity was prodigious. The results of these practical labors appeared principally in the shape of dissertations on abstract mathematics, and they fill ten volumes of "Anciens Memoirs." Still, as long as Colbert lived, the philosophers were protected, and experimental science—as they viewed it—flourished.

But when Louvois became Minister, matters took a new turn. If the work of the Academy thus far was properly defined as experimental, then Louvois soon showed the most opposite, and hence theoretical, disposition. When the public-spirited king decided to improve the landscape at Versailles with more indispensable cascades and the erection of a much-needed additional mountain, it was Louvois who told the members that they were paid to work, and set them at such theoretical tasks as aqueduct building, pipe laying and surveying. He made La Hire and Picard supervise the building and engineering, Thevenot plan watercourses, and Mariotte attack the problems of water supply. When there was not sufficient of this sort of theorizing to do at Versailles, Condé invited them to theorize in the same fashion at Chantilly.

Besides, the haut monde of Paris had heard of the new fashion at Whitehall, and how all the great English milords and miladies were besieging the Royal Society. Should the Court of the Grand Monarque be distanced in a matter of la mode? Immediately were the mathematicians invited to calculate the chances in every gambling game in vogue, in "quinque nova," in "le hoca" and "le lansquenet.” Sauveur, however, who too complacently evolved a surely winning system adapted to “la

barsette" in his capacity of "mathematician to the Court"-found himself abruptly invited into the closet of his irate sovereign, and given distinctly to understand that the royal prerogative included secrets of that sort, and that kings were not to be left subject to the run of luck ordained to common people. "What was the Royal

Academy for, if" etc., etc.?

Every one knows how Louis went to the wars, dragging poor Racine from his theatre to write history as he made it, and Perrault and Roemer and Mariotte and Blondel, regardless of the fact that some were mathematicians and others astronomers, to study bombs and ballistics. It was sufficient for Louis that they were all scientific persons. About the only philosopher of eminence whom he let alone was Cassini, and that because the astronomical observations in progress were useful for the Navy. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that in these circumstances the Academy, as one of its historians remarks, "lost its lustre and fell into a languor." There it remained until De Ponchartrain reorganized it in 1699, mainly after the bureaucratic system, so dear to the Gallic heart, and with such singular astuteness that it at once provided a variety of new offices for hangers-on of the Court. Thus inspired with new life, it proceeded to dispute the Newtonian theories for the next half century, and patriotically stuck to Descartes and his vortices long after they had become abandoned by Holland, Germany and St. Petersburg.1

All of this accounts for the fact that one may turn over the pages of the ten volumes of Anciens Memoirs before noted-yes, and those of many of the later tomes of the Histoire de l'Académie Royale—and find little or nothing to show that French philosophy had ever heard of the discoveries of Boyle or Hooke, or even of the German, Von Guericke. Yet in that (to us) dreary waste of antiquated natural history, anatomy and mathematics, there may be

1 Maury: L'Ancienne Académie des Sciences. Paris, 1864.

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found a short note, barely filling a printed page, which contains the suggestion which was the original cause which started the whole scientific world to puzzling over the wonders of the electric light.

The terrestrial measurements which enabled Newton to correct his calculations concerning the moon and to verify his belief in the effect of the earth's gravity thereon, were made by Jean Picard, a priest and an astronomer of remarkable ability. It was Picard who informed the Royal Academy of a curious effect which he had observed in the barometer which he employed in the Paris Observatory. The instrument of that time was merely a glass tube closed above, open below, exhausted of air and inserted, open end downwards, in a cup of mercury: the metal, of course, rising in the tube under the atmospheric pressure. Picard observed that when the instrument itself was moved so as to cause the mercury to vibrate in the tube, a light appeared in the empty portion of the latter, clearly visible in the dark. It is said that he first saw it while carrying the apparatus in his hands from one part of the observatory to another after nightfall. At all events, there was no mistaking the luminosity-which was a sort of broken glow above the quicksilver, and which appeared best when the mercury descended quickly. The note, which bears the date of 1675, adds that efforts had been made (combined experiments, probably) to find other barometers which would behave similarly, but not one had been encountered; that it had been resolved to examine the matter in every possible way, and that the future discoveries would be set forth in detail.1 The same cheerful confidence which the king had shown concerning coming developments in general, is here reflected with regard to what was going to be found out about this singular light.

'Mem. de l'Acad. Roy. des Sciences. Paris, 1730, vol. x., p. 556.

But the years went by, and if the discoveries were made nobody mentioned them, and the strange light which Picard had seen in the barometer was as little remembered as the glow which Guericke had obtained years before from his sulphur ball.

There had been known, since the beginning of the century, a mineral, sometimes termed the Bologna stone, sometimes the Bononian stone, from the place of its discovery, which would become luminous in the dark.' It had been accidentally found by one Casciorolus, a shoemaker who had deserted his trade for alchemy, and who gave it the name of "lapis solaris," because, from its illuminating properties, he conceived it especially suitable for the transmutation of silver into gold-the alchemical sol. As the Italian chemists seem to have agreed in this opinion, the stone soon became in great demand and brought fabulous prices, which were maintained despite the claim of Potier, a French chemist, that he could produce it artificially. In 1666, the English Royal Society records the death of a clergyman who was said to have exclusively possessed the art, without communicating it to any one.

The value placed upon the substance-which was barium sulphide, frequently used now as a basis for the so-called luminous paint-incited the chemists to endeavor to imitate it; with the result that, at about the time of Picard's observation of the light in his barometer, Brand, of Germany, produced a light-giving substance from animal excretions, and sold the secret of its manufacture to Krafft. Krafft named it "phosphorus" and took it to England, where it was exhibited to the king, and, as we have already seen, it constituted one of the most interesting of the Gresham College curiosities. In Germany, Kunkel, who learned of it from Krafft, published, in 1678, a pamphlet describing it, and the interest excited in Eng

1Beckmann: A History of Inv'ns and Discoveries. 3d ed., 1817, vol. iv., 419. Roscoe and Schorlemmer: A Treatise on Chemistry. N. Y., 1883, vol. i., 457. “