Abstract
“LES conquêtes passent, et ces opérations restent,” was the compliment with which Napoleon accepted from Delambre a copy of his “Base du Systeme métrique décimal.” The publication of this work of the great French geodesist offers a good reason why the second half of the above remark was as true as the first. The manuscript which Delambre left unpublished at his death gave an interesting historical account of the pioneer work of the eighteenth century in investigating the size and shape of the earth, and it also reveals the value of his own share in that work. Names well known outside the world of astronomy appear in the book: Colbert gave the first order for a measure of an arc along the meridian of Paris; Robespierre signed a document expelling Lavoisier, Laplace, Coulomb, and Delambre, with others, from the Commission des Poids et Mesures. Many other French names also occur in the book to remind the world how much geodesy owed in its earliest stages to the Academie des Sciences.
Grandeur et Figure de la Terre.
J. B. J. Delambre. Ouvrage augmenté de notes, de cartes, et publié par les soins de G. Bigourdan. Pp. viii+402. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1912.) Price 15 francs.
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Grandeur et Figure de la Terre . Nature 90, 101 (1912). https://doi.org/10.1038/090101a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/090101a0