too numerous memoirs on this subject that a few unhappy madmen sent in every year. Was the Académie wrong? Evidently not, and it knew perfectly well that by acting in this manner it did not run the least risk of stifling a discovery of moment. The Académie could not have proved that it was right, but it knew quite well that its instinct did not deceive it. If you had asked the Academicians, they would have answered: "We have compared the probability that an unknown scientist should have found out what has been vainly sought for so long, with the probability that there is one madman the more on the earth, and the latter has appeared to us the greater." These are very good reasons, but there is nothing mathematical about them; they are purely psychological. If you had pressed them further, they would have added: "Why do you expect a particular value of a transcendental function to be an algebraical number; if π be the root of an algebraical equation, why do you expect this root to be a period of the function sin 2x, and why is it not the same with the other roots of the same equation?" To sum up, they would have invoked the principle of sufficient reason in its vaguest form. Yet what information could they draw from it? At most a rule of conduct for the employment of their time, which would be more usefully spent at their ordinary work than in reading a lucubration that inspired in them a legitimate distrust. But
