You see in the ancient great colleges, professors concealed in some degree behind their portfolios, reading as from a pulpit, amid the indifference and inattention of their pupils, discourses prepared beforehand with great labour, and which reappear every year in the same form.  Nothing of this kind existed at the Normal School; oral lessons alone were there permitted.  The authorities even went so far as to require of the illustrious savans appointed to the task of instruction the formal promise never to recite any lectures which they might have learned by heart.  From that time the chair has become a tribune where the professor, identified, so to speak, with his audience, sees in their looks, in their gestures, in their countenance, sometimes the necessity for proceeding at greater speed, sometimes, on the contrary, the necessity of retracing his steps, of awakening the attention by some incidental observations, of clothing in a new form the thought which, when first expressed, had left some doubts in the minds of his audience.  And do not suppose that the beautiful impromptu lectures with which the amphitheatre of the Normal School resounded, remained unknown to the public.  Short-hand writers paid by the State reported them.  The sheets, after being revised by the professors, were sent to the fifteen hundred pupils, to the members of Convention, to the consuls and agents of the Republic in foreign countries, to all governors of districts.  There was in this something certainly of profusion compared with the parsimonious and mean habits of our time.  Nobody, however, would concur in this reproach, however slight it may appear, if I were permitted to point out in this very apartment an illustrious Academician, whose mathematical genius was awakened by the lectures of the Normal School in an obscure district town!

The necessity of demonstrating the important services, ignored in the present day, for which the dissemination of the sciences is indebted to the first Normal School, has induced me to dwell at greater length on the subject than I intended.  I hope to be pardoned; the example in any case will not be contagious.  Eulogiums of the past, you know, Gentlemen, are no longer fashionable.  Every thing which is said, every thing which is printed, induces us to suppose that the world is the creation of yesterday.  This opinion, which allows to each a part more or less brilliant in the cosmogonic drama, is under the safeguard of too many vanities to have any thing to fear from the efforts of logic.

I have already stated that the brilliant success of Fourier at the Normal School assigned to him a distinguished place among the persons whom nature has endowed in the highest degree with the talent of public tuition.  Accordingly, he was not forgotten by the founders of the Polytechnic School.  Attached to that celebrated establishment, first with the title of Superintendent of Lectures on Fortification, afterwards appointed to deliver a course of lectures on Analysis, Fourier has left there a venerated name, and the reputation of a professor distinguished by clearness, method, and erudition; I shall add even the reputation of a professor full of grace, for our colleague has proved that this kind of merit may not be foreign to the teaching of mathematics.