Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/99

Rh of the ring of Saturn, which Galileo, with his more imperfect instrument, failed to make out. He also discovered one of the satellites of Saturn, but refused to look for more, since there were now as many satellites discovered as there were planets, and, from a false conception of the harmony of the universe, he considered it useless to search after others. He had the mortification of witnessing the success of Cassini in discovering four others.

In January, 1699, a new charter was granted to the Academy of Sciences. Until this time its charter was only preparatory, no provision having been made for the government of the society, its purpose, or the election of new members. The new charter provided for twenty pensionnaires, three geometricians, three astronomers, three chemists, three anatomists, three botanists, three to study mechanics, one secretary, and one treasurer; twenty associates, of whom eight may be foreigners; twenty élèves, or pupils, who acted as assistants to the associates; and ten honorary members. At the beginning of the year each member must declare the object of his study for the coming year, and all experiments must be repeated and tested by the Academy as a body. The Academy could not fill the vacancies in its own membership, but must recommend two or three candidates for each vacancy, and the Government had the right to make the selections from those recommended. The king had rooms fitted up for the Academy in the Louvre, where the organized body met for the first time April 29, 1699.

Under the labors of the Cassini, Malebranche, Fontenelle, Tournefort, Maraldi, and Méry, the reputation of the Academy of Sciences continued to increase until the growing luster of Newton's investigations and those of other members of the Royal Society threw it somewhat into shadow. Unfortunately, a spirit of national jealousy caused the scientists at Paris and London to misunderstand or willfully underestimate the services of their rivals, which delayed the settlement of many scientific questions longer than was otherwise necessary.

It was said of Fontenelle, who was Secretary of the Academy of Sciences for forty-two consecutive years, that when his Géometrie de l'lnfini was submitted to the Academy, he declared, "There, now, is a book which only eight men in Europe can understand, and the author is not one of the eight."

While the Cassinis were for so long time making their name famous at the Paris Observatory, there lived in Paris a family of Jussieus, five in number, and through a period of nearly a century and a half, whose labors in the Jardin du Roi and Academy of Sciences made them equally famous as botanists. With the Jussieus arose the "natural method" of botanical classification, as it is known, in contradistinction to the artificial of Linnæus.