Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/195

Q U E Q U E 177 1756 the articles "Fermiers" and "Grains," which con- tained the earliest announcement of his principles through the press ; and he published a number of minor pieces in the Journal de V Agriculture, du Commerce, et des Finances, and in the Epkemerides du Citoyen. His Droit Naturel, which was included in the Physiocratie of Dupont de Nemours, is especially noteworthy as showing the philo- sophic foundation of his economic system in the theory of the jus naturae. Interesting notices of Quesnay's character and habits have been preserved to us in the Memoires of Marmontel and those of Mme. du Hausset, femme de chambre to Mme. de Pompadour. 1 His probity and disinterested zeal for the public good did not suffer from the atmosphere of the court ; he never abused his credit with the sovereign or the favourite for any selfish end. To raise the national agriculture from the decay into which it had fallen and to improve the condition of the working population were the great aims he kept steadily in view. His conversation was piquant, humorous, and suggestive, often taking the form of moral and political apologues. Some of his weighty sayings are quoted by contemporary writers. Here is one of them. Having met in Madame de Pompadour's salon an official person who, in recommend- ing violent measures for the purpose of terminating the vexatious disputes between the clergy and the parliament, used the words, " C'est la hallebarde qui mene un royaume," Quesnay replied, " Et qu'est ce qui mene la hallebarde?" adding, after a pause, "C'est 1'opinion ; c'est done sur 1'opinion qu'il faut travailler." Diderot, D'Alembert, Duclos, Helvetius, Buffon, Turgot, Marmontel, used to meet in his rooms in the palace, and also several of the physiocrats above named; and Madame de Pom- padour, who affected the patronage of philosophy and science, sometimes came to join them and converse with them. Amongst them, when they were alone, subjects were sometimes discussed in a tone which would not have pleased the royal ear. Thus, one day, Mirabeau having said, " The nation is in a deplorable state," Lariviere replied in prophetic words, " It can only be regenerated by a conquest like that of China, or by some great internal convulsion ; but woe to those who live to see that ! The French people do not do things by halves ! " Adam Smith, during his stay on the Continent with the young duke of Buccleuch in 1764-66, spent some time in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Quesnay and some of his followers ; he paid a high tribute to their scientific services in his Wealth of Nations, and would have dedicated that work to Quesnay, had the latter been alive at the time of its publication. At the age of seventy Quesnay went back to the study of mathematics. He thought, we are told, that he had discovered the quadrature of the circle, and was not pre- vented by the remonstrances of his friends from printing his supposed solution of the problem. He died in 1774, having lived long enough to see his great pupil, Turgot, in office as minister of finance. Quesnay had married in 1718, and had a son and a daughter ; his grandson by the former was a member of the first Legislative Assembly. The economic writings of Quesnay are collected in the 2d vol. of the Principaux ficonomistes, published by Guillaumin, with preface and notes by Eugene Daire. His writings on medicine and surgery have now only an historic interest. They were as follows : 1. Observations sur Us effcts de la saignee, 1730 and 1750 ; 2. Essai physique sur I' economic animate avec I' art de guerir par la saignee, 1736 and 1747 ; 3. Recherches critiques et historiques sur I'origine, 1 These Memoires were first printed by Quintin Craufurd in his Melanges d'Histoire et de Litter ature, 1806, and again in 1817 ; they have since been published in the Collection des Memoires relatifs d la devolution Frangaise, 1824, and also in the Bibliotheque des Memoires relatifs d I'liistoire de France -pendant le lS me Siecle. les divers etats, et les pi-ogres de la chirurgie en France (said to have been the joint work of Quesnay and Louis), 1744, and, with slightly - altered title, 1749; 4. Traite'dc la suppuration, 1749 ; 5. Traite de la gangrene, 1749; 6. Traite des fievres continues, 1753 ; 7. Obser- vations sur la conservation de la vie (said to have been printed at Versailles along with the Tableau ficonomique), 1758. His other writings were the article " Evidence " in the Encyclopedic, and Recherches sur Vimdence des verites ge'omelriques, with a Projet de nouveaux elements de geometric, 1773. Quesnay's filoge was pro- nounced in the Academy of Sciences by Grandjean de Fouchy (see the Recueil of that Academy, 1774, p. 134). There is a good por- trait of him, engraved by J. Ch. Francois, which is reproduced in the Dictionnaire d'ficonomie Politique of Coquelin and Guillau- min. (<! K. I.) QUESNEL, PASQUIER (1634-1719), Roman Catholic theologian, was born in Paris on July 14, 1634, and, after graduating in the Sorbonne with distinction in 1653, joined the Congregation of the Fathers of the Oratory in 1657, receiving priest's orders in 1659. In 1675 he pub- lished an edition of the works of Leo the Great, in the notes to which the Gallican liberties were defended. The work was consequently put upon the Index in the follow- ing year, and QuesnePs relations with his ecclesiastical superiors became so strained that in 1681 he had to retire to Orleans. Four years later, finding himself unable to sign a document imposed on all members of the Oratory in condemnation of Jansenism, he fled to Brussels, where he was intimately associated with Arnauld, and where, encouraged by him, he published in 1694-95 a complete edition of the Reflexions Morales sur le Nouveau Testa- ment, a work of edification on which he had first begun to engage himself shortly after joining the Oratory, and a part of which had appeared as early as about 1671. The nature of its contents, and still more the known sympa- thies of its author, made the book an object of unwearying Jesuit hostility ; Quesnel was imprisoned for a short time in the palace of the archbishop of Mechlin in 1703, but happily succeeded in escaping into Holland ; his papers, however (compromising, it is said, to many persons), fell into the hands of the enemy, and long were to the Pere La Chaise his " pot au noir " (as he called it) by means of which he was able to darken the prospects of his adver- saries as he chose. The bull Unigenitus, in which no fewer than 101 sentences from the Reflexions Morales were condemned as heretical, was obtained from Clement IX. in September 8, 1713 (see vol. xiii. p. 567). Quesnel died at Amsterdam on December 2, 1719, A complete list of his works is given by Moreri. QUETELET, LAMBERT ADOLPHE JACQUES (1796-1874), astronomer, meteorologist, and statistician, was born at Ghent, February 22, 1796, and educated at the lyceum of that town. In 1819 he was appointed professor of mathe- matics at the athenaeum of Brussels; in 1828 he became lecturer at the newly created museum of science and literature, and he continued to hold that post until the museum was absorbed in the free university in 1834. In 1828 he was appointed director of the new royal observa- tory which it had been decided to found, chiefly at his instigation. The building was finished in 1832, and the instruments were ready for work in 1835, from which date the observations were published in 4to volumes (Annales de I'Observatoire Royal de Bruxelles), but Quetelet chiefly devoted himself to meteorology and statistics. From 1834 he was perpetual secretary of the Brussels Academy, and published a vast number of articles in its Bulletin, as also in his journal Correspondance Mathematique et Phys- ique (11 vols., 1825-39). He died on February 17, 1874. 2 Quetelet's astronomical papers refer chiefly to shooting stars and similar phenomena. He organized extensive magnetical and 2 His son EIINEST QUETELET (1825-78) was from 1856 attached to the observatory and made a great number of observations of stars with proper motion, from which a large catalogue of stars is now (1885) being published. XX. 23