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Updated: May 10, 2025
It happened that, at that period, the powerful mind of Newton was directed to this subject; a friendly intercourse then existed between these two distinguished characters; and thus the first observations that could lay any claim to accuracy were at once brought in aid of those deep researches in which our illustrious geometer was then engaged.
The ardour of Laplace, combined with his power of analytical research, surmounted all obstacles. By means of an investigation which demanded the most minute attention, the great geometer discovered in the theory of the moon's movements, two well-defined perturbations depending on the spheroidal figure of the earth.
Whether Euclid's axioms are true, is a question as to which the pure mathematician is indifferent; and, what is more, it is a question which it is theoretically impossible to answer with certainty in the affirmative. Thus the geometer leaves to the man of science to decide, as best he may, what axioms are most nearly true in the actual world.
The long route which I have yet to traverse, will hardly allow me to add a few words relative to the administrative services of the illustrious geometer. Appointed French Commissioner at the Divan of Cairo, he became the official medium between the General-in-Chief and every Egyptian who might have to complain of an attack against his person, his property, his morals, his habits, or his creed.
I entered this establishment, then, on the nomination of Poisson, my friend, and through the intervention of Laplace. The latter loaded me with civilities. I was happy and proud when I dined in the Rue de Tournon with the great geometer.
While recording them in the annals of science, historians will not neglect to draw attention to this singular peculiarity: that the geometer to whom we owe the first certain demonstration of the existence of a heat independent of a solar influence in the interior of the earth, has annihilated the immense part which this primitive heat was made to play in the explanation of the phenomena of terrestrial temperature.
It is an incredible confusion. Angles are thrown fantastically by some mad geometer, it would seem. Splendid banyan trees shelter one after toiling up the unending steps, and dotted over the landscape, indiscriminately in magnificent picturesqueness, are pretty farmhouses nestling almost out of sight in groves of sacred trees.
Each pleasure contributes to invigorate and intensify the particular exercise that it is attached to; the geometer who studies his science with pleasure becomes more acute and successful in prosecuting it.
Garbett, an English aesthetical writer, assures us that the Anthemion bears not the slightest resemblance to the Honeysuckle or any other plant, "being no representation of anything in Nature, but simply the necessary result of the complete and systematic attempt to combine unity and variety by the principle of gradation." But here he speaks like a geometer, and not like an artist.
Accordingly I wrote to Professor Miller, of Cambridge, and this geometer has kindly read over the following statement, drawn up from his information, and tells me that it is strictly correct:
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