LA GRANGE LAGRANGE 105 sists of three complete oblique plates. Skull arched posteriorly and above; the superior cellules of the tympanum are inconspicuous. All the feet are four-toed, the great toe being entirely absent; nails long and subfalcular; ears very long ; tail long ; fur soft but cadu- cous. Of this genus there are two species, the L. Cuvieri and the Z. pallipes, being, it is supposed, the viscacha of all the writers from Pedro de Cieca downward, who have declared that animal to be an inhabitant of the western or Peruvian slope of the Andes. It is about the size and color of the hare, which is wanting to the fauna of Peru, Chili, and Ecuador, and appears to be equivalent in those countries to that creature and to the rabbit, among which it has been classed by some writers, especially Lesson, in his Manuel, who has apparently confounded the eastern and west- ern species, lagotis and lagostomus, and who gives it as the lepus viscaccia of Ginelin. This Lagotis Cuvieri. animal breeds among rocks and stony places, burrows in the ground, and is famous, if mor- tally wounded and not killed at once, for taking refuge in its burrow and dying within it, so as to be lost to its pursuers. Its fur, which is longer and softer than that of the rabbit, has the peculiarity of falling out as soon as the animal is dead. This animal and the chin- chilla are evidently connecting links between the hares and the squirrels, the first coming nearer to the hares, the latter to the squirrels. LA GRANGE, a N. E. county of Indiana, bor- dering on Michigan, and drained by Pigeon river; area, 384 sq. m. ; pop. in 1870, 14,148. It has a nearly level surface, much of which is occupied by timber. The soil is fertile. The Grand Rapids and Indiana railroad passes through the county. The chief productions in 1870 were 445,731 bushels of wheat, 344,882 of Indian corn, 58,488 of oats, 119,563 of po- tatoes, 120,461 Ibs. of wool, 243,649 of butter, and 18,139 tons of hay. There were 5,217 horses, 4,211 milch cows, 5,072 other cattle, 31,958 sheep, and 12,004 swine; 4 manufac- tories of carriages, 1 of woollen goods, 6 flour mills, 17 saw mills, and 3 currying establish- ments. Capital, La Grange. LAG RANGE, Joseph Louis, count de, a French geometrician, born in Turin, of French parents, Jan. 25, 1736, died in Paris, April 10, 1813. His first publication was a letter to C. J. Fagna- no, June 23, 1754, which contained a series of fluxions and fluents of different orders, some- what resembling the binomial theorem of New- ton. In 1755 he was made professor of geometry in the royal school of artillery at Turin, where many of his pupils were his seniors. In con- junction with several of them, he established a scientific society, whose memoirs, owing particularly to his contributions, afterward acquired a high reputation, his essays on the propagation of sound being especially noticed. He meanwhile corresponded with Euler, to whom he communicated his first ideas of the solution of the isoperimetrical problems. In 1764 he won a prize from the French academy of sciences for a memoir on the libration of the moon. In 1766 a second prize, on the sub- ject of the satellites of Jupiter, was awarded him by the French academy ; and he was in- vited to become a mathematical director of the Prussian academy. In Berlin he was treated with great distinction by Frederick the Great, and spent there 20 years, during which he prepared his great work, the Mecanique analy- tique. On the death of Frederick, yielding to a secret desire and to the entreaties of Mirabeau, notwithstanding liberal offers from the courts of Naples, Sardinia, and Tuscany, he went to France, where he was welcomed by Queen Marie Antoinette, received as a veteran pen- sioner of the academy an income equal to that which he had enjoyed at Berlin, and was pro- vided with apartments in the Louvre. His Mecanique analytique appeared a few months after his arrival in Paris in 1787, and com- manded general admiration. Though now in the zenith of his fame, he was seized with fits of morbid melancholy, during which he lost all taste for his wonted pursuits. His spirits revived about the beginning of the revolution, and his treatment by the revolutionists was perhaps still more flattering than that which he had obtained from kings and princes. His pension was unanimously confirmed by the na- tional assembly, and he was appointed mem- ber of a committee for examining useful in- ventions, and director of the mint in conjunc- tion with Monge and Berth ollet. In 1793, when a decree of the convention ordered all persons not born in France to leave the country, an exception was made in favor of Lagrange. On the establishment of the normal school and of the polytechnic school he was appointed professor in those institutions. For his pupils he wrote his Theorie des f auctions analytiques (4to, 1797; new ed., 1813), and his Lecons sur
