Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/570

550 resumed his place in the opposition. At the revolution of 1848 Dupont de 1 Eure was made president of the provi sional government as being its oldest member. In the following year, having failed to secure his re-election to the chamber, he retired into private life. He died in 1855 at the age of eighty-eight. The consistent firmness with which he adhered to the cause of constitutional liberalism during the many changes of his times gained him the highest respect of his countrymen, by whom he was styled the Aristides of the French tribune.  DUPONT DE NEMOURS, (1739-1817), a French political economist and statesman, was born at Paris on the 14th December 1739. He studied for the medical profession, but did not enter upon practice, his attention having been early directed to economic questions through his friendship with Quesnay, Turgot, and other leaders of the school known as the Economists. To this school he rendered valuable service by several pamphlets on financial questions, and numerous articles representing and advocating its views in a popular style in the Journal de P Agriculture, du Commerce, et des Finances, and the Ephemerides du Citoyen, of which he was successively editor. In 1772 he accepted the office of secretary of the Council of Publip Instruction from Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland. Two years later he was recalled to his native country by the advent of his friend Turgot to power. After assisting the minister in his wisely-conceived but un availing schemes of reform during the brief period of his tenure of office, Dupont shared his dismissal and retired to Gatinais, in the neighbourhood of Nemours, where he employed himself in agricultural improvements. During his leisure he wrote a translation of Ariosto (1781), and Memoires sur la viede Turgot (1782). He was drawn from his retirement by Vergennes, who employed him in prepar ing, along with the English commissioner Dr James Hutton, the treaty for the recognition of the independence of the United States (1782), and a treaty of commerce with Great Britain (1786). Under Calonne he was admitted to the Council of State, and appointed commissary-general of commerce. During the llevolution period he advocated reform and constitutional monarchy as against the iews of the extreme republicans, and was therefore destined for vengeance when the republicans triumphed. After the 1 Oth August 1792 he was concealed for some weeks in the obser vatory of the Mazarin College, from which he contrived to escape to the country. During the time that elapsed before he was discovered and arrested he wrote his Philosophic de Vunivors. Imprisoned in La Force, he was one of those who had the good fortune to escape the guillo tine till the death of Robespierre set them free. As a member of the Council of Five Hundred, Dupont carried out his policy of resistance to the Jacobins, and made him self prominent as a member of the reactionary party. After the republican triumph on the 18th Fructidor (4th Septem ber) 1797 his house was sacked by the mob, and he himself only escaped transportation to Cayenne through the influence of M. J. Che nier. In 1799 he found it advisable for his comfort, if not for his safety, to emigrate with his family to the United States. On his return to France in 1802 he declined to accept any office under Napoleon, and devoted himself almost exclusively to literary pursuits. The consideration accorded to him in the United States was shown by his being employed to arrange the treaty of 1803, by which Louisiana was sold to the Union, and by his being requested by Jefferson to prepare a scheme of national edu cation, which was published in 1812 under the title Sur reducafiou nationale dans les Etats Unis d Amerique. Though the scheme was not carried out in the United States, several of its features have been adopted in the existing French code. On the downfall of Napoleon in 1814 Dupont became secretary to the Provisional Govern ment, and on the restoration he was made a councillor of state. The return of the emperor in 1815 determined him to quit France, and he spent the close of his life with his two sons, who had established a powder manufactory in the state of Delaware. He died near Wilmington, Delaware, on the 6th August 1817.

1em  DUPUIS, (1742-1809), an eminent French scientific writer, was born of poor parents at Trye- Chateau, between Gisors and Chaumont, October 26, 1742. His father, who was a teacher, instructed him in mathe matics and land-surveying. While he was engaged in measuring a tower by the geometric method the Due de la Ptochefoucault met him, and, being struck with his intelligence, gave him a bursary in the college of Harcourt. Dupuis made such rapid progress in his studies that, at the age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor of rhetoric at the college of Lisieux, where he had previously passed as a licentiate of theology. In his hours of leisure he applied himself to the study of the law, and in 1770 was admitted an advocate before Parliament. Two university discourses which he delivered, one on occasion of the distribution of prizes, and the other on the death of the empress Maria Theresa, having been printed, were admired on account of their elegant Latinity, and laid the foundation of the author s fame as a writer. His chief attention, however, was devoted to mathematics, the object of his early studies ; and for some years he attended the astronomical lectures of Lalaude, with whom he formed an intimate friendship. In 1778 he constructed a telegraph on the principle suggested by Araontons, and employed it in keeping up a correspondence with his friend M. Fortin in the neighbouring village of Bagneux, until the Revolu tion rendered it necessary that he should destroy his machine to avoid suspicion. Much about the same time, Dupuis formed his ingenious theory with respect to the origin of the Greek months. In the course of his investigations upon this subject, he com posed a long memoir on the constellations, in which he endeavoured to account for the want of any resemblance between the groups of stars in the heavens and the names by which they are known, by supposing that the zodiac was, for the people who invented it, a sort of calendar at once astronomical and rural, and that the figures chosen for the constellations were such as would naturally suggest the agricultural operations of the season. It seemed only necessary, therefore, to discover the clime and the period in which the constellation of Capricorn must have arisen with the sun on the day of the summer solstice, and the varnal equinox must have occurred under Libra. It appeared to Dupuis that this clime was Upper Egypt, and that the perfect correspondence between the signs and their significa tions had existed in that country at a period of between fifteen and sixteen thousand years before the present time ; that it had existed only there ; and that this harmony had been disturbed by the effect of the precession of the equinoxes. He therefore ascribed the invention of the signs of the zodiac to the people who then inhabited Upper Egypt or Ethiopia. This was the basis on which Dupuis established his mythological system, and endeavoured to explain the subject of fabulous history, and the whole system of the theogony and theology of the ancients. Persuaded of the importance of his discoveries, which, however, were by no means entirely original, Dupuis 