The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Abauzit, Firmin

ABAUZIT, Firmin, ab-ō-zē, fēr-mań, French scholar of Arabian blood and Protestant parents: b. Uzès, 1679; d. Geneva, 1767. He lost his father when only two; in 1685, on the Revocation, the authorities tried to tutor him for a Catholic, but his mother contrived his flight with an elder brother to the Cevennes, where after two years as fugitives they gained Geneva, and the mother escaped from imprisonment and joined them. He early acquired great proficiency in languages, physics, and theology; traveled to Holland and made acquaintance with Bayle and others, and to England, where Newton admired him greatly, corrected through him an error in his “Principia,” and wrote to him, “You are well worthy to judge between Leibnitz and me.” William III wished him to settle in England, but he preferred to return to Geneva: assisted a society there in translating the New Testament into French, was offered but refused a chair in the university, but accepted a sinecure librarianship, and died very aged. He was of wonderful versatility and universality, seeming to have made everything a speciality; Rousseau, jealous of every one, yet eulogized him warmly; and Voltaire asked a flattering stranger who said he had come to see a genius, whether he had seen Abauzit. His heirs, through theological differences, destroyed his papers, so that little remains of his works; he wrote articles, however, for Rousseau's ‘Dictionary of Music’ and other works, and edited with valuable additions Spon's ‘History of Geneva.’ Collected works, Geneva, 1770; London, 1773. Translations by Dr. Harwood, 1770, 1774. For personal information, consult Senebier's ‘Histoire Littéraire de Genève’; Harwood's ‘Miscellanies’; Orme's ‘Bibliotheca Biblica’ (1834).