Fourier not having been enabled to gird on the sword, assumed the habit of a Benedictine, and repaired to the Abbey of St. Benoit-sur-Loire, where he intended to pass the period of his noviciate. He had not yet taken any vows when, in 1789, every mind was captivated with beautifully seductive ideas relative to the social regeneration of France. Fourier now renounced the profession of the Church; but this circumstance did not prevent his former masters from appointing him to the principal chair of mathematics in the Military School of Auxerre, and bestowing upon him numerous tokens of a lively and sincere affection. I venture to assert that no event in the life of our colleague affords a more striking proof of the goodness of his natural disposition and the amiability of his manners. It would be necessary not to know the human heart to suppose that the monks of St. Benoit did not feel some chagrin upon finding themselves so abruptly abandoned, to imagine especially that they should give up without lively regret the glory which the order might have expected from the ingenious colleague who had just escaped from them. Fourier responded worthily to the confidence of which he had just become the object. When his colleagues were indisposed, the titular professor of mathematics occupied in turns the chairs of rhetoric, of history, and of philosophy; and whatever might be the subject of his lectures, he diffused among an audience which listened to him with delight, the treasures of a varied and profound erudition, adorned with all the brilliancy which the most elegant diction could impart to them. MEMOIR ON THE RESOLUTION OF NUMERICAL EQUATIONS. About the close of the year 1789 Fourier repaired to Paris and read before the Academy of Sciences a memoir on the resolution of numerical equations of all degrees. This work of his early youth our colleague, so to speak, never lost sight of. He explained it at Paris to the pupils of the Polytechnic School; he developed it upon the banks of the Nile in presence of the Institute of Egypt; at Grenoble, from the year 1802, it was his favourite subject of conversation with the Professors of the Central School and of the Faculty of Sciences; this finally, contained the elements of the work which Fourier was engaged in seeing through the press when death put an end to his career.