purities; it discharges itself by perspiration, by transpiration, by all the secretions. Fever is itself a succour: it is a rectification when it does not kill.

migated, other opinions. It is not for us to examine this question. The philosophers and physicians have been right in sensu humano, and the theologians, in sensu divino. It is said in Deuteronomy, Man, by his reason, accelerates the (chap. xxviii. 22.), that if the Jews do cure, by administering bitters, and, above not serve the law, they shall be smittenall, by regimen. This reason is an oar, "with a consumption, and with a fever, with which he may row for some time on and with an inflammation, and with an the sea of the world, when disease does extreme burning." It is only in Deuter- not swallow him up. onomy, and in Molière's Physician in Spite of Himself, that people have been threatened with fever.

It seems impossible that fever should not be an accident natural to an animate body, in which so many fluids circulate; just as it is impossible for an animate body not to be crushed by the falling of a rock.

Blood makes life; it furnishes the viscera, the limbs, the skin, the very extremities of the hairs and nails, with the fluids, the humours proper for them.

It is asked,-How is it that nature has abandoned the animals, her work, to so many horrible diseases, almost always accompanied by fever? How and why so many disorders, with so much order, formation, and destruction, everywhere side by side? This is a difficulty that often gives me a fever; but I beg you will read the letters of Memmius. Then, perhaps, you will be inclined to suspect that the incomprehensible artificer of vegetables, animals, and worlds, having made all for the best, could not have made anything better.

FICTION.

Is not a fiction, which teaches new and

not admire the Arabian story of the sultan, who would not believe that a little time could appear long, and who disputed with his dervise on the nature of duration? The latter, to convince him of it, begged

This blood, by which the animal has life, is formed by the chyle. During pregnancy, this chyle is transmitted from the uretha to the child; and, after the child is born, the milk of the nurse pro-interesting truths, a fine thing? Do you duces this same chyle. The greater diversity of aliments it afterwards receives, the more the chyle is liable to be soured. This alone forming the blood, and this blood, composed of so many different humours, so subject to corruption, circu-him only to plunge his head for a molating through the whole human body more than five hundred and fifty times in twenty-four hours, with the rapidity of a torrent, it is not only astonishing that fever is not more frequent; it is astonishing that man lives. In every articulation, in every gland, in every passage, there is danger of death; but there are also as many succours as there are dangers. Almost every membrane extends or contracts as occasion requires. All the veins have sluices, which open and shut, giving passage to the blood, and preventing a return, by which the machine would be destroyed. The blood, rushing through all these canals, purifies itself. It is a river that carries with it a thousand im

ment into the basin in which he was washing. Immediately, the sultan finds himself transported into a frightful desert; he is obliged to labour to get a livelihood; he marries, and has children, who grow up and ill treat him; finally, he returns to his country and his palace, and he there finds the dervise who has caused him to suffer so many evils for five and twenty years. He is about to kill him ; and is only appeased when he is assured that all passed in the moment in which, with his eyes shut, he put his head into the water.

You still more admire the fiction of the loves of Dido and Eneas, which caused the mortal hatred between Carthage and

Rome; as also that which exhibits, in Elysium, the destinies of the great men of the Roman empire.

Fierté of manner, in society, is the expression of pride; fierté of soul, is great› ness. The distinctions are so nice, that a proud spirit is deemed blameable, while a proud soul is a theme of praise. By the former is understood one who thinks advantageously of himself, whilst the latter denotes one who entertains elevated sentiments.

You also like that of Alcina, in Ariosto, who possesses the dignity of Minerva with the beauty of Venus, who is so charming to the eyes of her lovers, who intoxicates them with voluptuous delights, and unites all the loves and graces; but who, when she is at last reduced to her true self, and Fierté, announced by the exterior, is the enchantment has passed away, is no- so great a fault, that the weak, who abthing more than a little shrivelled dis-jectly praise it in the great, are obliged to gusting old woman. soften it, or rather to extol it, by speakAs to fictions which represent nothing, ing of "this noble fierté." It is not teach nothing, and from which nothing simply vanity, which consists in setting a results, are they anything more than fal-value upon little things; it is not presities? And if they are incoherent and heaped together without choice, are they anything better than dreams?

You will possibly tell me, that there are ancient fictions which are very incoherent, without ingenuity, and even absurd, which are still admired; but is it not rather owing to the fine images which are scattered over these fictions, than to the inventions which introduce them? I will not dispute the point; but if you would be hissed at by all Europe, and afterwards forgotten for ever, write fictions similar to those which you admire.

FIERTE.

FIERTE is one of those expressions, which, having been originally employed in an offensive sense, are afterwards used in a favourable one.

sumption, which believes itself capable of great ones; it is not disdain, which adds contempt of others to a great opinion of self; but it is intimately allied to all these faults.

This word is used in romances, poetry, and above all in operas, to express the severity of female modesty. We meet with vain fierté, vigorous fierté, &c. Poets are, perhaps, more in the right than they imagine. The fierté of a woman is not only rigid modesty and love of duty, but the high value which she sets upon her beauty.

The fierté of the pencil is sometimes spoken of, to signify free and fearless touches.

FIGURE.

EVERY one desirous of instruction should read with attention all the articles It is censure, when this word signifies in the "Dictionnaire Encyclopédique,” high-flown, proud, haughty, and disdain-under the head FIGURE; viz. ful. It is almost praise, when it means the loftiness of a noble mind.

It is a just eulogium on a general who marches towards the enemy with fierté. Writers have praised the fierté of the gait of Louis XIV.; they should have contented themselves with remarking its nobleness.

Figure of the Eurth, by M. d'Alembert-a work both clear and profound, in which we find all that can be known on the subject.

Figure of Rhetoric, by César de Marsais-a piece of instruction which teaches at once to think and to write; and, like many other articles, make us regret that Fierté, without dignity, is a merit in-young people in general have not a concompatible with modesty. It is only venient opportunity of reading things so fierté in air and manners which offends; useful. it then displeases, even in kings.

Human Figure, as relating to painting

and sculpture-an excellent lesson given to every artist, by M. Watelet.

Figure, in physiology-a very ingenious article, by M. d'Abbés de Caberoles.

Figure, in arithmetic and in algebra— by M. Mallet.

Figure, in logic, in metaphysics, and in polite literature, by M. le Chevalier de Jaucour a man superior to the philosophers of antiquity, inasmuch as he has preferred retirement, real philosophy, and indefatigable labour, to all the advantages that his birth might have procured him, in a country where birth is set above all beside, excepting money.

Figure or Form of the Earth.

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Tortato, Bishop of Avila, near the close of the fifteenth century, declares in his commentary on Genesis, that the Christian faith is shaken, if the earth is believed to be round.

Columbius, Vesputius, and Magellan, not having the fear of excommunication by this learned bishop before their eyes, the earth resumed its rotundity in spite of him.

Then man went from one extreme to the other; and the earth was regarded as a perfect sphere. But the error of the perfect sphere was the mistake of philosophers; while that of a long flat earth was the blunder of ideots.

When once it began to be clearly known that our globe revolves on its own

Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Posido-axis every twenty-four hours, it might nius, and all the geometricians of Asia, have been inferred from that alone that of Egypt, and of Greece, having acknow-its form could not be absolutely round. ledged the sphericity of our globe, how Not only does the centrifugal zone condid it happen that we, for so long a time, siderably raise the waters in the region of imagined that the earth was a third longer the equator, by the motion of the diurnal than it was broad, and thence derived the rotation, but they are moreover elevated terms longitude and latitude, which con- about twenty-five feet, twice a day, by tinually bear testimony to our ancient the tides: the lands about the equator ignorance? must then be perfectly inundated. But they are not so; therefore the region of the equator is much more elevated, in proportion, than the rest of the earth: then the earth is a spheroid elevated at the equator, and cannot be a perfect sphere. This proof, simple as it is, had escaped the greatest geniuses; because a universal prejudice rarely permits investigation.

The reverence due to the Bible, which teaches us so many truths more necessary and more sublime, was the cause of this our almost universal error.

It had been found, in psalm ciii., that God had stretched the heavens over the earth like a skin; and as a skin is commonly longer than it is wide, the same was concluded of the earth.

St. Athanasius expresses himself as We know that, in 1762, in a voyage to warmly against good astronomers as Cayenne, near the line, undertaken by against the partisans of Arius and Euse-order of Louis XIV., under the auspices bius. "Let us," says he, 66 stop the of Colbert, the patron of all the arts, mouths of those barbarians, who, speak- Richer, among many other observations, ing without proof, dare to assert that the found that the oscillations or vibrations heavens also extend under the earth." of his time-piece did not continue so freThe fathers considered the earth as a quent as in the latitude of Paris, and that great ship, surrounded by water, with the it was absolutely necessary to shorten the prow to the east, and the stern to the pendulum one line and something more than a quarter. Physics and geometry were at that time not near so much cultivated as they now are: what man would have believed that an observation so tri

west.

We still find, in Cosmas, a monk of the fourth century, a sort of geographical chart, in which the earth has this figure.

vial in appearance, a line more or less, fore nearer the centre of the earth than could lead to the knowledge of the great-the equator; therefore the earth was est physical truths? It was first of all flattened at the poles.

trifugal forces, had proved that the consequent diminution of weight on the surface of a sphere was not great enough to explain the phenomena, and that therefore the earth must be a spheroid flattened at the Poles. Newton, by the principles of attraction, had found nearly the same relations: only it must be ob

discovered that weight must necessarily Never did reasoning and experiment be less on the equator than in our lati-so fully concur to establish a truth. The tudes, since weight alone causes the oscil-celebrated Huygens, by calculating cealation of a pendulum. Consequently, the weight of bodies being the less the farther they are from the centre of the earth, it was inferred, that the region of the equator must be much more elevated than our own-much more remote from the centre; so the earth could not be an exact sphere. Many philosophers acted, on the occa-served, that Huygens believed this force sion of these discoveries, as all men act when an opinion is to be changed-they disputed on Richer's experiment; they pretended that our pendulums made their vibrations more slowly about the equator only because the metal was lengthened by the heat; but it was seen that the heat of the most burning summer lengthens it but one line in thirty feet; and here was an elongation of a line and a quarter, a line and a half, or even two lines, in an iron rod, only three feet and eight lines long.

principle of a gravity always equal, falls to nothing before the discovery made by Newton, that a body transported, for instance, to the distance of ten diameters from the centre of the earth, would weigh one hundred times less than at the dis

inherent in bodies determining them towards the centre of the globe, to be everywhere the same. He had not yet seen the discoveries of Newton; so that he considered the diminution of weight by the theory of centrifugal forces only, The effect of centrifugal forces diminishes the primitive gravity on the equator. The smaller the circles in which this centrifugal force is exercised become, the more it yields to the force of gravity; thus, at the pole itself the centrifugal force, being null, must leave the primiSome years after, MM. Varin, De-tive gravity in full action. But this shayes, Feuillée, and Couplet, repeated near the equator the same experiment on the pendulum; and it was always found necessary to shorten it, although the heat was very often less on the line than fifteen or twenty degrees from it. This experiment was again confirmed by the acade-tance of one diameter. micians whom Louis XV. sent to Peru; It is then by the laws of gravitation, and who were obliged, on the mountains combined with those of the centrifugal about Quito, where it froze, to shorten force, that the real form of the earth must the second pendulum about two lines. be shown. Newton and Gregory had About the same time, the academi-such confidence in this theory, that they cians who went to measure an are of the meridian in the north, found that at Pello, within the Polar circle, it was necessary to lengthen the pendulum, in order to have the same oscillations as at Paris: consequently weight is greater at the polar circle than in the latitude of France, as it is greater in our latitude than at the equator. Weight being greater in the north, the north was there

did not hesitate to advance, that experiments on weight were a surer means of knowing the form of the earth than any geographical measurement.

Louis XIV. had signalised his reign by that meridiau, which was drawn through France: the illustrious Dominic Cassini had begun it with his son; and had, in 1701, drawn from the feet of the Pyrenees to the observatory a line as

ciple from Paris to Dunkirk; and the degrees were still found to grow shorter as they approached the north. People were still mistaken respecting the figure of the earth, as they had been concerning the nature of light. About the same time, some mathematicians, who were performing the same operations in China, were astonished to find a difference among their degrees, which they had expected to find alike; and to discover, after many verifications, that they were shorter towards the north than towards the south. This accordance of the ma

straight as it could be drawn, considering the almost insurmountable obstacles which the height of mountains, the changes of refraction in the air, and the altering of instruments were constantly opposing to the execution of so vast and delicate an undertaking; he had, in 1701, measured six degrees eighteen minutes of that meridian. But, from whatever cause the error might proceed, he had found the degrees towards Paris, that is, towards the north, shorter than those towards the Pyrenees and the south. This measurement gave the lie both to that of Norwood and to the new theory of the earth flat-thematicians of France with those of tened at the poles. Yet this new theory China was another powerful reason for was beginning to be so generally re- believing in the oblate spheroid. In ceived, that the academy's secretary did France they did still more; they meanot hesitate, in his history of 1701, to say sured parallels to the equator. It is that the new measurements made in easily understood that on an oblate spherFrance proved the earth to be a spheroid oid our degrees of longitude must be flattened at the poles. The truth was, shorter than on a sphere. M. de Cassini that Dominic Cassini's measurement led found the parallel which passes through to a conclusion directly opposite; but, St. Maio to be shorter by one thousand as the figure of the earth had not yet be- and thirty-seven toises than it would come a question in France, no one at have been on a spherical earth. that time was at the trouble of combatiug this false conclusion. The degrees ef the meridian from Collioure to Paris were believed to be exactly measured; and the pole, which from that measurement must necessarily be elongated, was believed to be flattened.

All these measurements proved that the degrees had been found as it was wished to find them. They overturned, for a time, in France, the demonstrations of Newton and Huygens; and it was no longer doubted that the poles were of a form precisely contrary to that which had An engineer, named M. de Roubais, at first been attributed to them. astonished at this conclusion, demon-short, nothing at all was known about

strated that, by the measurements taken in France, the earth must be an oblate spheroid, of which the meridian passing "through the poles must be longer than the equator, the poles being elongated. But of all the natural philosophers to whom he addressed his dissertation, not one would have it printed; because it seemed that the academy had pronounced it was too bold in an individual to raise his voice. Some time after the error of 1701 was acknowledged, that which had been said was unsaid; and the earth was lengthened by a just conclusion drawn from a false principle. The meridian was continued in the same prin

the matter.

In

At length, other academicians, who had visited the polar circle in 1736, having found, by new measurements, that the degree was longer there than in France, people doubted between them and the Cassinis. But these doubts were soon after removed: for these same astronomers, returning from the pole, examined afresh the degree measured by Picard, in 1677, to the north of Paris; and found the degree to be a hundred and twenty-three toises longer than it was according to Picard's measurement. If, then, Picard, with all his precautions, had made his degree one hundred and