Écriture de chats

Résumé En

This article was initially part of collective reflections on the writing of science. The example of cats recalls that there are two ways of writing about it in the 18th century, using either words or numbers or at least mathematics. True to his mechanist conception of the universe, Fontenelle applauds the mathematician Antoine Parent's demonstration which reduces the mystery of a cat always falling on its feet, never on its head, to a simple shift in the centre of gravity ! By contrast with this reduction of the miraculous to the intelligible, naturalists prefer common language to geometry. But Daubenton and Buffon's minute descriptions, so rich in concrete observations, are no less loaded with prejudice or even ancestral fantasies. For ordinary words are not mere signs and they bear as many obscure thoughts as they explain clear ideas. Buffon criticises both mathematical abstraction and Linnean obscurity. What would he have thought of the 1789 revolution which Lavoisier's nomenclature brought about in traditional chemistry ?