the investigation of the effects produced on the movements of the planets and comets by a resisting medium; and the determination of the values of the masses of the planets and satellites.  In the six books forming the fifth volume of the work, the author, besides presenting his readers with an historical exposition of the labours of Newton and his successors on the theory of gravitation, gives an account of various researches relative to the system of the universe, which had occupied his attention subsequently to the publication of the previous volumes.  In the eleventh book he considers the subjects of the figure and rotation of the earth.  In the twelfth book he investigates the attraction and repulsion of spheres, and the laws of equilibrium and motion of elastic fluids.  The thirteenth book is devoted to researches on the oscillations of the fluids which cover the surfaces of the planets; the fourteenth, to the subject of the movements of the celestial bodies around their centres of gravity; the fifteenth, to the movements of the planets and comets; and the sixteenth, to the movements of the satellites.  The author published a supplement to the third volume, containing the results of certain researches on the planetary theory, and a supplement to the tenth book, in which he investigates very fully the theory of capillary attraction.  There was also published a posthumous supplement to the fifth volume, the manuscript of which was found among his papers after his death.

JOSEPH FOURIER.

BIOGRAPHY READ AT A PUBLIC ASSEMBLY OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ON THE 18TH OF NOVEMBER, 1833.

Gentlemen,—­In former times one academician differed from another only in the number, the nature, and the brilliancy of his discoveries.  Their lives, thrown in some respects into the same mould, consisted of events little worthy of remark.  A boyhood more or less studious; progress sometimes slow, sometimes rapid; inclinations thwarted by capricious or shortsighted parents; inadequacy of means, the privations which it introduces in its train; thirty years of a laborious professorship and difficult studies,—­such were the elements from which the admirable talents of the early secretaries of the Academy were enabled to execute those portraits, so piquant, so lively, and so varied, which form one of the principal ornaments of your learned collections.

In the present day, biographies are less confined in their object.  The convulsions which France has experienced in emancipating herself from the swaddling-clothes of routine, of superstition and of privilege, have cast into the storms of political life citizens of all ages, of all conditions, and of all characters.  Thus has the Academy of Sciences figured during forty years in the devouring arena, wherein might and right have alternately seized the supreme power by a glorious sacrifice of combatants and victims!

Recall to mind, for example, the immortal National Assembly.  You will find at its head a modest academician, a patern of all the private virtues, the unfortunate Bailly, who, in the different phases of his political life, knew how to reconcile a passionate affection for his country with a moderation which his most cruel enemies themselves have been compelled to admire.