REAUMUR, RENE-ANTOINE FEIICIIAULT, an emi nent French naturalist, was born at Rochelle in 1683. Ile was educated for the bar, but being particularly fond of mathematics, natural history and physics, he went to Paris in 1703, where he distinguished himself so highly, that he was elected a member of the Acade my of Sciences in 1703. The memoirs of this learned body from 1709 to 1763, containing nearly a hundred memoirs cm various useful and important • subjects by the anti:Lir. The improvement of the manu factures of France was a constant object of his attention, and he made many important discoveries respecting the con% ersion of soft iron into steel, and the softening of cast iron so as to make the cast as fine as in wrought iron. These labours were rewarded by the Duke of Orleans, the regent of the kingdom, who gave him a pension of 12,000 Byres, or about 5001. sterling; but he refused to accept of it unless it was granted in name of the Academy, and continued to that body after his death. An account of these investigation. he published in 1722, in a work entitled, L'?rt de Converter le fer Forge en dicier, et L'Art d'4doucir le Fe, Fondu. Reaumur also introduced into France the manufacture of tinned plates, and he made many experiments on the manufacture of porcelain, which contributed greatly to the advancement of that an in France.
Our author made numerous experiments on the me thod practised in Egypt of hatching chickens by artifi cial heat, of which he has given an account in a work published in 1752, in 2 vols. under the title of L'Art de
Faire Eciore, et d'Elever en Toute Saison des Oiseaux Domestiques. Of the methods described in this work, we have already given some account in our article HATCHING.
In natural history, our author is chiefly celebrated for his entomological writings. Besides many papers on that subject, printed among the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, he published an elaborate work, entitled Illemoires pour servir a Historic Naturella des Insectes, in 6 vols. 4to; the first of which was published at Paris in 1734, and the other five between that year and 1742. This work contained many original observations, made with the gt eatest care, on the physiology of in sects of all kinds. Reaumur likewise made many curious experiments on the digestive powers of the stomach in grhminivorous and carnivorous animals, and he established the different modes of action in those two classes, viz. that of trituration and solution.
The name of Reaumur has been rendered popular by his method of graduating the thermometer. He always used spirit of wine, and placed the freezing point at 0°, and the boiling point at 80°.
Reaumur was a man of excellent private character, correct in his morals, and agreeable and amiable in his manners. Ile died at Bermandiere in the Maine, from a hurt in his head, received from a fall in 1757, at the age of seventy-five, leaving his MSS. and his cabinet of natural history to the Academy of Sciences.