rmine the
measurement of a degree of longitude in 1736. Of this mission he
published an account. At the same time a similar mission was sent to
South America under La Condamine, who underwent considerable hardship,
and, like Maupertuis, published his adventures when he came back.
Mathematics were indeed the favourite study of the time. Clairaut, De
Moivre, Euler, Laplace, all wrote in French, or belonged to
French-speaking and French-descended races; while Voltaire's own
contributions to the reception of Newton's principles in France were not
small, and his beloved Madame du Chatelet was an expert mathematician.
Voltaire also devoted much attention to chemistry, which was the special
subject of such of the Baron d'Holbach's labours as were not devoted to
the overthrow of Christianity. It was not, however, till the eve of the
Revolution that the most important discoveries in this science were made
by Lavoisier and others. The Empire was a much more favourable time for
science than for literature. Bonaparte was fond of the society of men of
science, and pleased by their usual indifference to politics. Monge,
Berthollet, Champollion, were among his favourites. Geoffroy St. Hilaire
and Cuvier were, however, the chief men of science of this period, and
Cuvier at least had no mean command of a literary style sufficient for
his purposes. His chief work of a literary-scientific character was his
discourse _Sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_. Earlier than
this the physician Cabanis, in his _Rapports de Physique et de Morale_,
composed a semi-materialist work of great excellence according to
eighteenth-century standards. Bichat's _La Vie et la Mort_, the work of
an anatomist of the greatest talent, who died young, also belongs to
literature.

[Sidenote: Voyages and Travels.]

Some contributions to letters were also made by the voyages of discovery
which formed part of the general scientific curiosity of the time. The
chief of them is that of Bougainville, 1771, which, giving the first
clear notion to Frenchmen of the South Sea Islands, had a remarkably
stimulating effect on the imaginations of the _philosophe_ party.

[Sidenote: Linguistic and Literary Study.]

In works of pure erudition more directly connected with literature, the
age was less fruitful than its immediate predecessor. The laborious
studies of the Benedictines, however, continued. One work of theirs,
important to our subject, was projected and in part