s privy council. But La Place,
then and since, the first scientific name of France, was found utterly
inadequate to even the almost sinecure duties of his office. Napoleon
soon found that he could make no use of him. He accordingly consulted
him no longer. "I found his mind," said he, "like his book, full of
_infiniments petits_." Or if we look for further illustration among the
French geometers--the only men among whom the trial can be made, from
their opportunities of power in the Revolution--there was not one of
them who exhibited any qualification for the higher duties of public
life. Bailly, Condorcet, and their tribe, proved themselves utterly
feeble, helpless, and trifling, where manliness, activity, and
intelligence of mind were required. The Savans were swept away like a
swarm of mice, or crushed like musquitoes, when they dared to buzz in
the presence of the public. That they were first-rate mathematicians
there can be no question; that they quarrelled about their mathematical
theories with the bitterness, and not a little in the style of village
gossips, is equally certain; and that, though the Encyclopedists had
chiefly died off before the Revolution, their successors and imitators
were extinguished by their preposterous combination of an avarice of
power, and of an inadequacy to exertion, is a fact written unanswerably
in the history of their trifling career, and of their early scaffolds.
The ridiculous figure made in politics by the first astronomer of
France, at this moment, only strengthens the conclusion.

The life of D'Alembert is, however, one of the happiest illustrations of
the use to which science may be applied, in raising an obscure
individual into public fame. Yet, it is not to be forgotten, that
D'Alembert's European celebrity commenced only when he had laid aside
the exclusive study of mathematics, and devoted himself to general
literature, and, shaking off the dust of his closet, he became a man of
the world.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert was born in November 1717, and was exposed as a
foundling near the church of St Jean le Rond in Paris, and thus called
by the name of the parish. The commissary of the district, taking pity
upon the infant's apparently dying condition, instead of sending it to
the hospital, where it would have inevitably died, gave it to be nursed
by the wife of a poor glazier. In a few days, however, a person named
D'Estouches, a commissary of artillery, came forward, acknowled