The cause why all these academical discourses have unhappily done so little honour to this body is evident enough. Vitium est temporis potius quam hominis (the fault is owing to the age rather than to particular persons).  It grew up insensibly into a custom for every academician to repeat these elogiums at his reception; it was laid down as a kind of law that the public should be indulged from time to time the sullen satisfaction of yawning over these productions.  If the reason should afterwards be sought, why the greatest geniuses who have been incorporated into that body have sometimes made the worst speeches, I answer, that it is wholly owing to a strong propension, the gentlemen in question had to shine, and to display a thread-bare, worn-out subject in a new and uncommon light.  The necessity of saying something, the perplexity of having nothing to say, and a desire of being witty, are three circumstances which alone are capable of making even the greatest writer ridiculous.  These gentlemen, not being able to strike out any new thoughts, hunted after a new play of words, and delivered themselves without thinking at all:  in like manner as people who should seem to chew with great eagerness, and make as though they were eating, at the same time that they were just starved.

It is a law in the French Academy, to publish all those discourses by which only they are known, but they should rather make a law never to print any of them.

But the Academy of the Belles Lettres have a more prudent and more useful object, which is, to present the public with a collection of transactions that abound with curious researches and critiques.  These transactions are already esteemed by foreigners; and it were only to be wished that some subjects in them had been more thoroughly examined, and that others had not been treated at all.  As, for instance, we should have been very well satisfied, had they omitted I know not what dissertation on the prerogative of the right hand over the left; and some others, which, though not published under so ridiculous a title, are yet written on subjects that are almost as frivolous and silly.

The Academy of Sciences, in such of their researches as are of a more difficult kind and a more sensible use, embrace the knowledge of nature and the improvements of the arts.  We may presume that such profound, such uninterrupted pursuits as these, such exact calculations, such refined discoveries, such extensive and exalted views, will, at last, produce something that may prove of advantage to the universe.  Hitherto, as we have observed together, the most useful discoveries have been made in the most barbarous times.  One would conclude that the business of the most enlightened ages and the most learned bodies, is, to argue and debate on things which were invented by ignorant people.  We know exactly the angle which the sail of a ship is to make with the keel in order to its sailing better; and yet Columbus discovered America without having the least idea of the property of this angle:  however, I am far from inferring from hence that we are to confine ourselves merely to a blind practice, but happy it were, would naturalists and geometricians unite, as much as possible, the practice with the theory.