for science unless it proved itself useful. Nevertheless, useless as lie deemed them to be, he disturbed neither the universities nor the academy. He contented himself with ridiculing the pretensions of the members of the latter and their methods of study. Yet he had some respect for the science of medicine and that of chemistry. In these two branches of study Berlin, during this period, was eminent. But apart from the Gymnasium Director Frisch and the Royal Librarian La Croze there were in the city no philologists, historians, jurists or theologians of the first rank. If the king permitted the academy to live, he took pleasure in crippling its resources and in compelling it to pay salaries to men outside its membership, men who experimented in medicine and chemistry and were willing to carry out his wishes. During the period 1716-1740 only five volumes of miscellanies were published aside from the observations which appeared in the calendar. The fate of the academy might have been better had it issued, as Leibniz wished it to do, a volume every year.
Sixteen months after the death of Leibniz the vacant presidency was filled by the appointment to it of Jacob Paul Gundling, a man of considerable knowledge, a fine story teller and the butt of the king's wit. He was the author of about a dozen volumes on historical and economic subjects, but was drunk a good deal of the time and altogether unfit to hold an office to which a man like Leibniz had given dignity. Thirteen years later, in 1733, acting on the advice of minister von Vierecke, the king made Jabloniski president and the academy began to show signs of a new life. A few famous men had settled in Berlin and some of them had accepted membership in the academy. But complete deliverance came only with the king's death and the accession to the throne. May 31, 1740, of his son Frederick the Great, who in almost all respects was the opposite of his father. This was the beginning of the new era, an era in which French thought prevailed, the era of Maupertuis, D'Alembert and Condorcet.
