Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise, is a novel written in letters describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman.
In 1835 he published his principal work, Sur l'homme et le developpement de ses facultes, ou essai de physique sociale (2nd ed., 1869), containing a resume of his statistical researches on the development of the physical and intellectual qualities of man, and on the "average man" both physically and intellectually considered.
These ideas are further developed in various papers in the Bulletin and in his L'Anthropometrie, ou mesure des differentes facultes de l'homme (18'ji), in which he lays great stress on the universal applicability of the binomial law, - according to which the number of cases in which, for instance, a certain height occurs among a large number of individuals is represented by an ordinate of a curve (the binomial) symmetrically situated with regard to the ordinate representing the mean result (average height).
The results of his leisure were in 1787 a new translation of Newton's Optics, and in 1788 his Memoires academiques, ou nouvelles decouvertes sur la lumiere.
He wrote an epic, Charlemagne, ou l'Eglise delivree (2 vols., 1814), also La Verite sur les Cent _Tours and Memoirs, which were not completed.
