section (1785), and read in the course of two years six treatises, forming a "Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire anatomique des tendons, dans laquelle on occupe spécialement de leurs capsules muqueuses." He had studied chemistry under Bucquet, and this chemist having fallen ill, requested Fourcroy to take his place. He at last acceded to the request, and delivered a brilliant lecture, which was received with great applause by his audience. At the death of Macquer he became, together with Berthollet, a candidate for the professorship at the jardin du roi, and on the recommendation of Buffon he was elected. This office he filled for upwards of twenty-five years. In 1787 he published a method of chemical nomenclature, conjointly with Lavoisier, Berthollet, and Guyton de Morveau. His lectures at the jardin du roi became celebrated, and attracted such large audiences that it was found necessary to enlarge the theatre. The elegance and clearness of his style attracted many persons to the study of chemistry. In 1792 Fourcroy was chosen a supplementary deputy (suppléant) for Paris in the national assembly, but he did not take his seat till after the fall of Robespierre, He fell under the suspicion of the jacobins, and narrowly escaped impeachment. He was instrumental in introducing the new uniform standard of weight and measurement, and was particularly active on the committee of public instruction. After the 9th Thermidor he became a member of the committee of public safety. He saved Darcet's life. He has been accused of sending Lavoisier to the scaffold, through jealousy; but at the time of Lavoisier's execution he himself was under surveillance, nor does there seem to be the slightest foundation for such an accusation. Fourcroy entered the council of ancients in 1795, and in 1798 resumed his professorship of chemistry. On the 18th Brumaire Napoleon appointed him member of the council of state, section of the interior, and in 1801 intrusted him with the direction of public instruction, for which he prepared a detailed plan. He organized the central school of public works, which obtained the name of the école polytechnique, and also the three great schools of medicine at Paris, Strasbourg, and Montpellier, as well as a number of colleges and lyceums. He also took part in the amalgamation of the Académie with the Institute of France, and in the formation of the museum of natural history. Notwithstanding these services, he was not elected chancellor of the imperial university, a position he had confidently hoped to obtain. This disappointment preyed upon his mind, and together with his incessant labours, seems to have hastened his death. He had for some time suffered from palpitation of the heart. On the 16th December, 1809, he suddenly exclaimed, "Je suis mort," and fell lifeless. Shortly before his death he received the title of count, with a grant of twenty thousand francs. His éloge was delivered by Cuvier in the Institute. Fourcroy published "Leçons d'histoire naturelle et de chimie," Paris, 1781; this work was republished in 1791, and again, in 1801, under the title of "Système des connaisances chimiques." He discovered that only pure water is formed by the combustion of hydrogen with oxygen, formed several detonating compounds, prepared baryta and strontia in a state of purity by heating their nitrates, and established the chemical identity of arragonite and calc-spar. He prepared vegetable albumin, investigated the nature of the acids formed in the dry distillation of wood and gum, and proposed a new theory of the formation of ether. He discovered the conversion of animal substances into adipic bodies, when the graveyard of the church des Innocents was opened in 1786. He analyzed various calculi, as well as human urine. A vast number of his researches were undertaken jointly with Vauquelin.—C. E. L.
FOURIER, François Marie Charles, a famous preacher of socialism, who has been called by Lerminier the Pythagoras of the shop, and whose scheme has been designated by the same distinguished writer the poetry of industrialism, was born at Besançon on the 7th April, 1772. His father, a linendraper, who died in 1781, left him a fortune of three or four thousand pounds. The taste of François led him toward science, but the wish, or the command of his family, strongly expressed, compelled him to adopt commerce instead. In 1793 he set up at Lyons as a grocer; but the bloody events in that city proved fatal to his business, and nearly to himself. Not long after this disaster, he was driven to an occupation which, perhaps, he disliked still more than commerce—he was forced by order of the government to join a cavalry regiment. From this thraldom, which lasted two years, he was enabled to escape on the plea of ill health. To commerce he returned, not, however, as a prosperous or unprosperous grocer. Residing chiefly at Lyons, from 1800 to 1814, he had opportunities, as commercial traveller, of visiting Germany and other countries. By the death of his mother in 1812, he came into the possession of an income of about £40 a year, which perhaps would have been sufficient for his moderate wants, if he had not been fond of making scientific experiments in connection with his ideas. Of a situation which he held during the Hundred Days in the prefecture of Lyons, he deprived by the restoration of the Bourbons. Moving to and fro, partly in relation to his private affairs, and partly for the propagation of his doctrines, in which he was indefatigable; and sometimes living at Lyons, sometimes at Besançon, and sometimes elsewhere—he finally settled in the beginning of 1829 at Paris, where a sect gradually gathered round him, which made up in zeal for the smallness of its numbers, though it never succeeded in exciting the same attention as the more brilliant Saint Simonian school. To the Saint Simonians Fourier offered the fiercest opposition, denouncing what he characterized as their snares and charlatanism. In 1832 a weekly journal—the Phalanstère—was started at Paris to advocate Fourierism. It died, however, in 1834. For the indifference of the public, which was profound and undeniable, Fourier was consoled by the enthusiasm of loving and devoted disciples. He was himself so ardently, so intensely an enthusiast, that he always went home with the expectation of finding a letter from some rich man, perhaps from some prince, offering to place at his disposal enormous sums to create the Phalansterian paradise. It was in the midst of such dreams that, on the 10th October, 1837, death overtook him. Fourier was a voluminous writer, but few of his more important works were published during his lifetime, and some of them, we believe, are still in manuscript. They may be characterized, as to their objects and contents, as cosmological, psychological, and communistic: for Fourier did not merely aim at being a social innovator, he had also the ambition to give a true theory of the universe, and a profound analysis of human nature. It is but fair to Fourier, then, to estimate his cosmology, his psychology, and his communistic system, altogether independently of each other. His cosmology may be dismissed in a word: it is the maddest, most monstrous of dreams, an unnatural conglomeration of caprices and eccentricities, but revealing no wealth of phantasy, no power of invention. Of what he was able to achieve as a psychologist, it is easy for those not acquainted with French to judge. His treatise on the "Passions of the Human Soul," was translated some years ago by Mr. J. R. Morell; Mr. Hugh Doherty, an admirer, and in some sort a disciple of Fourier, furnishing critical annotations, a biography of Fourier, and a general introduction. The work was reviewed in the Gentleman's Magazine by the author of the present article, and many points were discussed which cannot be entered on here. Fourier's psychology is not without shrewdness and subtlety, but it repels by its cynical coarseness, as if he had been inspired by Rabelais and Rochefoucauld—the one saying his pithiest, the other his bitterest—both their falsest. The plans which Fourier propounded as a social reformer had not much novelty, but they had a species of mathematical completeness and analogical ingenuity. He contemplated, or at least professed to contemplate, no violent change in the existing constitution of society. The world was to be transfigured gradually, and a fine world it would at last be—the sea changed into lemonade, and on the globe thirty-seven millions of poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven millions of philosophers equal to Newton, thirty-seven millions of writers equal to Moliere! Utopias and Utopians are not to be despised. Every man who by a diviner scheme of life strives to raise his fellowmen, may be described as an Utopian. But Fourier, though one of the craziest of visionaries, was one of the grossest of realists, and only by idealism can we regenerate mankind. Brought up to commerce, Fourier detested it because it had ruined him, and because he had the instinctive dislike of an honest man toward the commercial frauds which he was called upon to behold. Into his elaborate communistic programme, however, he introduced no other or higher element than the commercial spirit. There is no appeal to any better motive than personal interest and the love of pleasure. The eighteen hundred individuals forming a phalange—what we may call a communistic village—are to work as little as possible, and to have enjoyments as many and as varied as possible. This notion of attractive labour has
