Fortunately, thanks to the exhortations of the priests, to the pastoral letters of the bishops, these ferocious Spaniards contented themselves with threatening.
Some years after Mechain made a second expedition into Spain: he proposed to prolong the meridian from Barcelona to the Balearics. This was the first time it had been attempted to make the triangulations overpa.s.s a large arm of the sea by observing signals installed upon some high mountain of a far-away isle. The enterprise was well conceived and well prepared; it failed however.
The French scientist encountered all sorts of difficulties of which he complains bitterly in his correspondence. "h.e.l.l," he writes, perhaps with some exaggeration--"h.e.l.l and all the scourges it vomits upon the earth, tempests, war, the plague and black intrigues are therefore unchained against me!"
The fact is that he encountered among his collaborators more of proud obstinacy than of good will and that a thousand accidents r.e.t.a.r.ded his work. The plague was nothing, the fear of the plague was much more redoubtable; all these isles were on their guard against the neighboring isles and feared lest they should receive the scourge from them. Mechain obtained permission to disembark only after long weeks upon the condition of covering all his papers with vinegar; this was the antisepsis of that time.
Disgusted and sick, he had just asked to be recalled, when he died.
Arago and Biot it was who had the honor of taking up the unfinished work and carrying it on to completion.
Thanks to the support of the Spanish government, to the protection of several bishops and, above all, to that of a famous brigand chief, the operations went rapidly forward. They were successfully completed, and Biot had returned to France when the storm burst.
It was the moment when all Spain took up arms to defend her independence against France. Why did this stranger climb the mountains to make signals? It was evidently to call the French army. Arago was able to escape the populace only by becoming a prisoner. In his prison, his only distraction was reading in the Spanish papers the account of his own execution. The papers of that time sometimes gave out news prematurely.
He had at least the consolation of learning that he died with courage and like a Christian.
Even the prison was no longer safe; he had to escape and reach Algiers.
There, he embarked for Ma.r.s.eilles on an Algerian vessel. This ship was captured by a Spanish corsair, and behold Arago carried back to Spain and dragged from dungeon to dungeon, in the midst of vermin and in the most shocking wretchedness.
If it had only been a question of his subjects and his guests, the dey would have said nothing. But there were on board two lions, a present from the African sovereign to Napoleon. The dey threatened war.
The vessel and the prisoners were released. The port should have been properly reached, since they had on board an astronomer; but the astronomer was seasick, and the Algerian seamen, who wished to make Ma.r.s.eilles, came out at Bougie. Thence Arago went to Algiers, traversing Kabylia on foot in the midst of a thousand perils. He was long detained in Africa and threatened with the convict prison. Finally he was able to get back to France; his observations, which he had preserved and safeguarded under his shirt, and, what is still more remarkable, his instruments had traversed unhurt these terrible adventures. Up to this point, not only did France hold the foremost place, but she occupied the stage almost alone.
In the years which follow, she has not been inactive and our staff-office map is a model. However, the new methods of observation and calculation have come to us above all from Germany and England. It is only in the last forty years that France has regained her rank. She owes it to a scientific officer, General Perrier, who has successfully executed an enterprise truly audacious, the junction of Spain and Africa. Stations were installed on four peaks upon the two sides of the Mediterranean. For long months they awaited a calm and limpid atmosphere. At last was seen the little thread of light which had traversed 300 kilometers over the sea. The undertaking had succeeded.
To-day have been conceived projects still more bold. From a mountain near Nice will be sent signals to Corsica, not now for geodesic determinations, but to measure the velocity of light. The distance is only 200 kilometers; but the ray of light is to make the journey there and return, after reflection by a mirror installed in Corsica. And it should not wander on the way, for it must return exactly to the point of departure.
Ever since, the activity of French geodesy has never slackened. We have no more such astonishing adventures to tell; but the scientific work accomplished is immense. The territory of France beyond the sea, like that of the mother country, is covered by triangles measured with precision.
We have become more and more exacting and what our fathers admired does not satisfy us to-day. But in proportion as we seek more exact.i.tude, the difficulties greatly increase; we are surrounded by snares and must be on our guard against a thousand unsuspected causes of error. It is needful, therefore, to create instruments more and more faultless.
Here again France has not let herself be distanced. Our appliances for the measurement of bases and angles leave nothing to desire, and, I may also mention the pendulum of Colonel Defforges, which enables us to determine gravity with a precision hitherto unknown.
The future of French geodesy is at present in the hands of the Geographic Service of the army, successively directed by General Ba.s.sot and General Berthaut. We can not sufficiently congratulate ourselves upon it. For success in geodesy, scientific apt.i.tudes are not enough; it is necessary to be capable of standing long fatigues in all sorts of climates; the chief must be able to win obedience from his collaborators and to make obedient his native auxiliaries. These are military qualities. Besides, one knows that, in our army, science has always marched shoulder to shoulder with courage.
I add that a military organization a.s.sures the indispensable unity of action. It would be more difficult to reconcile the rival pretensions of scientists jealous of their independence, solicitous of what they call their fame, and who yet must work in concert, though separated by great distances. Among the geodesists of former times there were often discussions, of which some aroused long echoes. The Academy long resounded with the quarrel of Bouguer and La Condamine. I do not mean to say that soldiers are exempt from pa.s.sion, but discipline imposes silence upon a too sensitive self-esteem.
Several foreign governments have called upon our officers to organize their geodesic service: this is proof that the scientific influence of France abroad has not declined.
Our hydrographic engineers contribute also to the common achievement a glorious contingent. The survey of our coasts, of our colonies, the study of the tides, offer them a vast domain of research. Finally I may mention the general leveling of France which is carried out by the ingenious and precise methods of M. Lallemand.
With such men we are sure of the future. Moreover, work for them will not be lacking; our colonial empire opens for them immense expanses illy explored. That is not all: the International Geodetic a.s.sociation has recognized the necessity of a new measurement of the arc of Quito, determined in days of yore by La Condamine. It is France that has been charged with this operation; she had every right to it, since our ancestors had made, so to speak, the scientific conquest of the Cordilleras. Besides, these rights have not been contested and our government has undertaken to exercise them.
Captains Maurain and Lacombe completed a first reconnaissance, and the rapidity with which they accomplished their mission, crossing the roughest regions and climbing the most precipitous summits, is worthy of all praise. It won the admiration of General Alfaro, President of the Republic of Ecuador, who called them "los hombres de hierro," the men of iron.
The final commission then set out under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel (then Major) Bourgeois. The results obtained have justified the hopes entertained. But our officers have encountered unforeseen difficulties due to the climate. More than once, one of them has been forced to remain several months at an alt.i.tude of 4,000 meters, in the clouds and the snow, without seeing anything of the signals he had to aim at and which refused to unmask themselves. But thanks to their perseverance and courage, there resulted from this only a delay and an increase of expense, without the exact.i.tude of the measurements suffering therefrom.
GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
What I have sought to explain in the preceding pages is how the scientist should guide himself in choosing among the innumerable facts offered to his curiosity, since indeed the natural limitations of his mind compel him to make a choice, even though a choice be always a sacrifice. I have expounded it first by general considerations, recalling on the one hand the nature of the problem to be solved and on the other hand seeking to better comprehend that of the human mind, which is the princ.i.p.al instrument of the solution. I then have explained it by examples; I have not multiplied them indefinitely; I also have had to make a choice, and I have chosen naturally the questions I had studied most. Others would doubtless have made a different choice; but what difference, because I believe they would have reached the same conclusions.
There is a hierarchy of facts; some have no reach; they teach us nothing but themselves. The scientist who has ascertained them has learned nothing but a fact, and has not become more capable of foreseeing new facts. Such facts, it seems, come once, but are not destined to reappear.
There are, on the other hand, facts of great yield; each of them teaches us a new law. And since a choice must be made, it is to these that the scientist should devote himself.
Doubtless this cla.s.sification is relative and depends upon the weakness of our mind. The facts of slight outcome are the complex facts, upon which various circ.u.mstances may exercise a sensible influence, circ.u.mstances too numerous and too diverse for us to discern them all.
But I should rather say that these are the facts we think complex, since the intricacy of these circ.u.mstances surpa.s.ses the range of our mind.
Doubtless a mind vaster and finer than ours would think differently of them. But what matter; we can not use that superior mind, but only our own.
The facts of great outcome are those we think simple; may be they really are so, because they are influenced only by a small number of well-defined circ.u.mstances, may be they take on an appearance of simplicity because the various circ.u.mstances upon which they depend obey the laws of chance and so come to mutually compensate. And this is what happens most often. And so we have been obliged to examine somewhat more closely what chance is.
Facts where the laws of chance apply become easy of access to the scientist who would be discouraged before the extraordinary complication of the problems where these laws are not applicable. We have seen that these considerations apply not only to the physical sciences, but to the mathematical sciences. The method of demonstration is not the same for the physicist and the mathematician. But the methods of invention are very much alike. In both cases they consist in pa.s.sing up from the fact to the law, and in finding the facts capable of leading to a law.
To bring out this point, I have shown the mind of the mathematician at work, and under three forms: the mind of the mathematical inventor and creator; that of the unconscious geometer who among our far distant ancestors, or in the misty years of our infancy, has constructed for us our instinctive notion of s.p.a.ce; that of the adolescent to whom the teachers of secondary education unveil the first principles of the science, seeking to give understanding of the fundamental definitions.
Everywhere we have seen the role of intuition and of the spirit of generalization without which these three stages of mathematicians, if I may so express myself, would be reduced to an equal impotence.
And in the demonstration itself, the logic is not all; the true mathematical reasoning is a veritable induction, different in many regards from the induction of physics, but proceeding like it from the particular to the general. All the efforts that have been made to reverse this order and to carry back mathematical induction to the rules of logic have eventuated only in failures, illy concealed by the employment of a language inaccessible to the uninitiated. The examples I have taken from the physical sciences have shown us very different cases of facts of great outcome. An experiment of Kaufmann on radium rays revolutionizes at the same time mechanics, optics and astronomy. Why?
Because in proportion as these sciences have developed, we have the better recognized the bonds uniting them, and then we have perceived a species of general design of the chart of universal science. There are facts common to several sciences, which seem the common source of streams diverging in all directions and which are comparable to that knoll of Saint Gothard whence spring waters which fertilize four different valleys.
And then we can make choice of facts with more discernment than our predecessors who regarded these valleys as distinct and separated by impa.s.sable barriers.
It is always simple facts which must be chosen, but among these simple facts we must prefer those which are situated upon these sorts of knolls of Saint Gothard of which I have just spoken.
And when sciences have no direct bond, they still mutually throw light upon one another by a.n.a.logy. When we studied the laws obeyed by gases we knew we had attacked a fact of great outcome; and yet this outcome was still estimated beneath its value, since gases are, from a certain point of view, the image of the milky way, and those facts which seemed of interest only for the physicist, ere long opened new vistas to astronomy quite unexpected.
And finally when the geodesist sees it is necessary to move his telescope some seconds to see a signal he has set up with great pains, this is a very small fact; but this is a fact of great outcome, not only because this reveals to him the existence of a small protuberance upon the terrestrial globe, that little hump would be by itself of no great interest, but because this protuberance gives him information about the distribution of matter in the interior of the globe, and through that about the past of our planet, about its future, about the laws of its development.