Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/101

Rh for twenty-one years as one of the fermiers-généraux. "When the Academy of Sciences was suppressed in 1793, Lavoisier wrote to Lakanal, President of the Committee on Public Instruction, that the members of the Academy had formed a private society to continue their labors, and asked permission to use the Academy rooms. But even this privilege was denied them.

On the 2d of May, 1794, a general indictment was made in the National Assembly against the fermiers-généraux for conspiring against the Government, on the ground that they caused an adulteration of tobacco by the addition of water. Absurd as this charge appears to us of saner days, these men, including as they did some of the noblest of France, were actually tried, May 6th, and condemned to death, the entire body of twenty-eight being guillotined on the 8th of May, 1794.

After two years and a half of suppression the academies were revived by an act of the Convention of October, 1795, under the title of the "Institute," principally through the influence of Carnot, grandfather of the present President of France, who was at that time President of the Directory, and of Lakanal and Daunou. Instead of academies the Institute was divided into three classes, the first class for sciences physiques et mathématiques, the second class for sciences morales et politiques, and the third class for littérature et beaux-arts. The whirlwind of the Revolution swept away Directories and set up others. Carnot was obliged to fly for safety into Germany.

The seat in the class of mechanics of the Institute made vacant by the flight of Carnot was filled in 1797 by the election of a young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, just returned from his Italian campaign covered with glory. The First Consul paid much favorable attention to the Institute, and it continues to this day very much as it left his hands in the new constitution which he gave it in 1806. He exhibited his admiration for the pure sciences, and his dislike to the speculative sciences, philosophy and ethics, by the expansion of the Convention's first class and the entire suppression of the second class, thus creating four classes: Sciences physiques et mathématiques, la langue et la littérature françaises, histoire et littérature anciennes, and beaux-arts. It was Louis XVIII who, in 1816, restored the old names of the academies to the four classes of Napoleon.

Napoleon was fond of the society of scientists, and rewarded with prizes and honors the most noteworthy of scientific discoveries. Although at war with "perfide Albion," as he was wont to call England, he drew the line at scientists, and pardoned English prisoners at the simple request of Joseph Priestley, after all other means had been exhausted, and acceded to the award of three thousand francs by the first class of the Institute to Davy for his