Willing, though with caution, to work at an Academy of Sciences;--but dubious if the French are so admirable as they seem to themselves in such operations.
Veteran Wolf, one dimly begins to learn, could himself build a German Academy of Sciences, to some purpose, if encouraged! This latter was probably the stone of stumbling in that direction.

Veteran Wolf did not get to be President in the New Academy of Sciences; but was brought back, "streets all in triumph," to his old place at Halle; and there, with little other work that was heard of, but we hope in warm shoes and without much mounting of stairs, lived peaceably victorious the rest of his days.

Friedrich's thoughts are not of a German home-built Academy, but of a French one: and for this he already knows a builder; has silently had him in his eye, these two years past,--Voltaire giving hint, in the LETTER we once heard of at Loo.

Builder shall be that sublime Maupertuis; scientific lion of Paris, ever since his feat in the Polar regions, and the charming Narrative he gave of it.

"What a feat, what a book!" exclaimed the Parisian cultivated circles, male and female, on that occasion; and Maupertuis, with plenty of bluster in him carefully suppressed, assents in a grandly modest way.