Fourier never admitted the validity of this decision.  Even at the close of his life he gave unmistakable evidence that he thought it unjust, by causing his memoir to be printed in our volumes without changing a single word.  Still, the doubts expressed by the Commissioners of the Academy reverted incessantly to his recollection.  From the very beginning they had poisoned the pleasure of his triumph.  These first impressions, added to a high susceptibility, explain how Fourier ended by regarding with a certain degree of displeasure the efforts of those geometers who endeavoured to improve his theory.  This, Gentlemen, was a very strange aberration of a mind of so elevated an order!  Our colleague had almost forgotten that it is not allotted to any person to conduct a scientific question to a definitive termination, and that the important labours of D’Alembert, Clairaut, Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace, while immortalizing their authors, have continually added new lustre to the imperishable glory of Newton.  Let us act so that this example may not be lost.  While the civil law imposes upon the tribunes the obligation to assign the motives of their judgments, the academies, which are the tribunes of science, cannot have even a pretext to escape from this obligation.  Corporate bodies, as well as individuals, act wisely when they reckon in every instance only upon the authority of reason.

CENTRAL HEAT OF THE TERRESTRIAL GLOBE.

At any time the Theorie Mathematique de la Chaleur would have excited a lively interest among men of reflection, since, upon the supposition of its being complete, it threw light upon the most minute processes of the arts.  In our time the numerous points of affinity existing between it and the curious discoveries of the geologists, have made it, if I may use the expression, a work for the occasion.  To point out the ultimate relation which exists between these two kinds of researches would be to present the most important part of the discoveries of Fourier, and to show how happily our colleague, by one of those inspirations reserved for genius, had chosen the subject of his researches.

The parts of the earth’s crust, which the geologists call the sedimentary formations, were not formed all at once.  The waters of the ocean, on several former occasions, covered regions which are situated in the present day in the centre of the continent.  There they deposited, in thin horizontal strata, a series of rocks of different kinds.  These rocks, although superposed like the layers of stones of a wall, must not be confounded together; their dissimilarities are palpable to the least practised eye.  It is necessary also to note this capital fact, that each stratum has a well-defined limit; that no process of transition connects it with the stratum which it supports.  The ocean, the original source of all these deposits, underwent then formerly enormous changes in its chemical composition to which it is no longer subject.