by useful labours and placed in some honourable position, an artist in possession of the esteem and confidence of the public, and I am much mistaken if you obtain any thing else than refusals; but in 1798, France had hardly emerged from a terrible crisis, during which her very existence was frequently at stake.  Who, besides, had not encountered imminent personal danger?  Who had not seen with his own eyes enterprises of a truly desperate nature brought to a fortunate issue?  Is any thing more wanted to explain that adventurous character, that absence of all care for the morrow, which appears to have been one of the most distinguishing features of the epoch of the Directory.  Fourier accepted then without hesitation the proposals which his colleagues brought to him in the name of the Commander-in-Chief; he quitted the agreeable duties of a professor of the Polytechnic School, to go—­he knew not where, to do—­he knew not what.

Chance placed Fourier during the voyage in the vessel in which Kleber sailed.  The friendship which the philosopher and the warrior vowed to each other from that moment was not without some influence upon the events of which Egypt was the theatre after the departure of Napoleon.

He who signed his orders of the day, the Member of the Institute, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in the East, could not fail to place an Academy among the means of regenerating the ancient kingdom of the Pharaohs.  The valiant army which he commanded had barely conquered at Cairo, on the occasion of the memorable battle of the Pyramids, when the Institute of Egypt sprung into existence.  It consisted of forty-eight members, divided into four sections.  Monge had the honour of being the first president.  As at Paris, Bonaparte belonged to the section of Mathematics.  The situation of perpetual secretary, the filling up of which was left to the free choice of the Society, was unanimously assigned to Fourier.

You have seen the celebrated geometer discharge the same duty at the Academy of Sciences; you have appreciated his liberality of mind, his enlightened benevolence, his unvarying affability, his straightforward and conciliatory disposition:  add in imagination to so many rare qualities the activity which youth, which health can alone give, and you will have again conjured into existence the Secretary of the Institute of Egypt; and yet the portrait which I have attempted to draw of him would grow pale beside the original.

Upon the banks of the Nile, Fourier devoted himself to assiduous researches on almost every branch of knowledge which the vast plan of the Institute embraced.  The Decade and the Courier of Egypt will acquaint the reader with the titles of his different labours.  I find in these journals a memoir upon the general solution of algebraic equations; researches on the methods of elimination; the demonstration of a new theorem of algebra; a memoir upon the indeterminate analysis; studies on general mechanics; a technical and historical work upon the aqueduct which conveys the waters of the Nile to the Castle of Cairo; reflections upon the Oases; the plan of statistical researches to be undertaken with respect to the state of Egypt; programme of an intended exploration of the site of the ancient Memphis, and of the whole extent of burying-places; a descriptive account of the revolutions and manners of Egypt, from the time of its conquest by Selim.