Appointed perpetual secretary of the _Academie des Sciences_ in 1697, Fontenelle pronounced during forty years the panegyrics of those who had been its members. These _Eloges des Academiciens_ are masterpieces in a difficult art, luminous, dignified, generous without ostentation, plain without poverty of thought or expression. The discreet Fontenelle loved tranquillity--"If I had my hand full of truths, I should take good care before I opened it." He never lost a friend, acting on two prudent maxims, "Everything is possible," and "Every one is right." "It is not a heart," said Madame de Tencin, "which you have in your breast; it is a brain." It was a kindly brain, which could be for a moment courageous. And thus it was possible for him to enter his hundredth year, still interested in ideas, still tranquil and alert. A great arsenal for the uses of eighteenth-century philosophy was constructed and stored by PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706) in his _Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_, of which the first edition was published in 1697. Science, which found its popular interpreter in Fontenelle, was a region hardly entered by Bayle; the general history of Europe, from the close of the mediaeval period, and especially the records in every age of mythologies, religions, theologies, philosophies, formed his province, and it was one of wide extent. Born in 1647, son of a Protestant pastor, educated by Jesuits, converted by them and reconverted, professor of philosophy at Sedan, a fugitive to Rotterdam, professor there of history and philosophy, deprived of his position for unorthodox opinions, Bayle found rest not in cessation from toil, but in the research of a sceptical scholar, peaceably and endlessly pursued.