publish all those discourses by
which only they are known, but they should rather make a law never to
print any of them.

But the Academy of the _Belles Lettres_ have a more prudent and more
useful object, which is, to present the public with a collection of
transactions that abound with curious researches and critiques. These
transactions are already esteemed by foreigners; and it were only to be
wished that some subjects in them had been more thoroughly examined, and
that others had not been treated at all. As, for instance, we should
have been very well satisfied, had they omitted I know not what
dissertation on the prerogative of the right hand over the left; and some
others, which, though not published under so ridiculous a title, are yet
written on subjects that are almost as frivolous and silly.

The Academy of Sciences, in such of their researches as are of a more
difficult kind and a more sensible use, embrace the knowledge of nature
and the improvements of the arts. We may presume that such profound,
such uninterrupted pursuits as these, such exact calculations, such
refined discoveries, such extensive and exalted views, will, at last,
produce something that may prove of advantage to the universe. Hitherto,
as we have observed together, the most useful discoveries have been made
in the most barbarous times. One would conclude that the business of the
most enlightened ages and the most learned bodies, is, to argue and
debate on things which were invented by ignorant people. We know exactly
the angle which the sail of a ship is to make with the keel in order to
its sailing better; and yet Columbus discovered America without having
the least idea of the property of this angle: however, I am far from
inferring from hence that we are to confine ourselves merely to a blind
practice, but happy it were, would naturalists and geometricians unite,
as much as possible, the practice with the theory.

Strange, but so it is, that those things which reflect the greatest
honour on the human mind are frequently of the least benefit to it! A
man who understands the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, aided by a
little good sense, shall amass prodigious wealth in trade, shall become a
Sir Peter Delme, a Sir Richard Hopkins, a Sir Gilbert Heathcote, whilst a
poor algebraist spends his whole life in searching for astonishing
properties and relations in numbers, which at the same time are of no
manner of use, and will no