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By this employment I should have entered a society of men of letters of the first merit; M. de Mairan, Clairaut, De Guignes and the Abbe Barthelemi, with the first two of whom I had already made an acquaintance, and that of the two others was very desirable.
Mairan asserts, that in France it is common enough to see the zodiacal light, in the months of February and March, mingling with a kind of Aurora Borealis, which he calls 'undecided, and the nebulous matter of which spreads itself all around the horizon, or appears toward the west.
I will not swell my catalogue with the names of many other persons with whom I was or had become less intimate, although I sometimes saw them in the country, either at my own house or that of some neighbor, such for instance as the Abbes de Condillac and De Malby, M. de Mairan, De la Lalive, De Boisgelou, Vatelet, Ancelet, and others.
Herr von Mairan regarded the controversy between two celebrated astronomers, which arose from a similar difficulty as to the choice of a proper standpoint, as a phenomenon of sufficient importance to warrant a separate treatise on the subject.
This is well illustrated by the facts stated by M. Saisset: “When Mairan,” says he, “still young, and having a strong passion for the study of the ‘Ethique,’ requested Malebranche to guide him in that perilous route; we know with what urgency, bordering on importunity, he pressed the illustrious father to show him the weak point of Spinozism, the precise place where the rigour of the reasoning failed, the paralogism contained in the demonstration.
The persons appointed to examine my system were M. Mairan, M. Hellot, and M. de Fouchy, all three men of merit, but not one of them understood music, at least not enough of composition to enable them to judge of my project.
On the N. is a prominent enclosure, nearly as large as Sharp itself; and on the N.E. a brilliant little ring- plain, A, about 8 miles in diameter, connected with Sharp, as Madler shows, by a wide valley. LOUVILLE. A triangular-shaped formation on the E. of a line joining Mairan and Sharp. It is hemmed in by mountains, one of which towers 5000 feet above its dusky floor.
The observer who, upon penetrating into the interior of the earth, did not find an increasing heat, might then consider himself amply authorized to reject the hypothetical conceptions of Descartes, of Mairan, of Leibnitz, and of Buffon. But has the converse proposition the same certainty?
Equally little do they care for the interior of the earth, since they have learned that the central emanations of heat which Mairan imagined as a main source of aerial warmth can claim no such distinction.
I will not swell my catalogue with the names of many other persons with whom I was or had become less intimate, although I sometimes saw them in the country, either at my own house or that of some neighbor, such for instance as the Abbes de Condillac and De Malby, M. de Mairan, De la Lalive, De Boisgelou, Vatelet, Ancelet, and others.
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