These biographical sketches have not always preserved the same characteristics. Before the judges of the eighteenth century, Fontenelle himself, the ingenious Fontenelle, ventured to refer so briefly to technical points that his eulogy on Newton occupies only about thirty pages in octavo.
In proportion as the sciences progress the ancient boundaries of the academic eulogies should be enlarged, and, in fact, we having at last reached a period when the crowds are largely pressing to expositions of the mathematical and natural sciences with which our vast lecture rooms daily resound, the secretaries of the academy have begun to feel that it is time to rid themselves of the restraints which their illustrious predecessors had imposed upon themselves, that henceforth they might here, at the public sittings, speak of the labors of their associates in the terms hereafter to be used by the historians of the sciences.
This new course has already several times received your kind approbation. The idea of departing from it has never even suggested itself to my mind, as indeed, a little reflection would have reminded me, when M. I must acknowledge, too, that a close intimacy, an intimacy without a cloud for more than thirty years, has also contributed to extend this biography, and to enable me to give importance to certain details that one indifferent to him would have passed by unnoticed.
His wife was also generally beloved for the uniform sweetness of her disposition and a beneficence, ever on the watch for occasion upon which to exercise itself. A short time after the birth of their son, M. Before even understanding figures, or knowing how to form them, he made long calculations with the aid of a limited number of pebbles or beans. To illustrate to what an extraordinary degree the love of calculation had seized upon the young student, being deprived, by the tenderness of his mother, during a serious illness, of his dear little pebbles, he supplied their places with pieces of biscuit which had been allowed him after three days strict diet.
There are children, I know, whose apathy nothing seems able to arouse, and others, again, who take an interest in every thing, amuse themselves with even mathematical calculations without an object. You object to this assertion, charge it, perhaps, with exaggeration, and class numerical calculation with those distasteful tasks which duty and necessity alone can induce one to undertake.
