Histoire de l'académie royale des sciences, Année 1736

A collection of 30 scientific papers presented to the Academy of Sciences during the year 1736.
Among them is Pierre Bouguer's article on how to determine the Earth's shape. The question of the Earth's shape was one of the most pressing scientific problems of the 18th century. Newton's work predicted that the Earth should be a spheroid flattened at the poles (oblate), while earlier measurements by Cassini seemed to indicate an elongated spheroid (prolate). Bouguer's article describes the theoretical method for determining this shape by measuring the length of one degree of meridian at different latitudes.