To draw the French nation from the dependence, which, even in the present day it is obliged to place in foreign industry, it is necessary first to direct the national education towards the knowledge of those objects which require a correctness which hitherto has been totally neglected; to accustom the hands of our artists to the management of the various instruments that are necessary to measure the different degrees of work, and to execute them with precision; then the finisher becomes sensible of the accuracy it will require in the different works, and he will be enabled to set the necessary value on it.  For our artists to become, from their youth, familiar with geometry, and to be in a condition to attain it, it is necessary in the second place to render popular the knowledge of a great number of natural phenomena that are indispensable to the progress of industry; they will then profit for the advancement of the general instruction of the nation, which by a fortunate circumstance it has at its disposal, the principal resources that are necessary for it.  Lastly, it is requisite to extend among our artists the knowledge of the advancement of the arts and that of machines, whose object is either to diminish manual labour or to give to the result of labour more uniformity and precision; and on those heads it must be confessed we have much to draw from foreign nations.[1] All these views can only be accomplished by giving a new turn to national education.

    [1] Monsieur Monge has drawn much from our countryman,
    Hamilton’s work on Stereography but he has not mentioned his
    work.

This is to be done, in the first place, by making all intelligent young men (who are born with a fortune) familiar with the use of descriptive geometry, so that they may be able to employ their capital more profitably both for themselves and the nation, and also for those who have no other fortune than their education, so that their labour will bring them the greater reward.  This art has two principal objects, the first to represent with exactness, from drawings which have only two dimensions, objects which have three, and which are susceptible of a strict definition; under this point of view it is a language necessary to the man of genius when he conceives a project, and to those who are to have the direction of it; and lastly, to the artists who are themselves to execute the different parts.

The second object of descriptive geometry, is to deduce from the exact description of bodies all that necessarily follows of their forms and their respective positions; in this sense it is a means of seeking truth, as it offers perpetual examples of the passage from what is known to what is unknown, and as it is always applied to objects susceptible of the minutest evidence, it is necessary that it should form part of the plan of a national education.  It is not only fit to exercise the intellectual faculties of a great people,