Background
Cotte was born on November 20, 1740, in Laon, France. He was the son of a notary of the town, a husband of one of the nieces of the famous painters Le Nain.
Cotte was born on November 20, 1740, in Laon, France. He was the son of a notary of the town, a husband of one of the nieces of the famous painters Le Nain.
Cotte was educated in the Oratorian collèges of Soissons and Montmorency and entered the Oratorian order upon his graduation in 1758.
After teaching for some years in the order’s collèges in Juilly and Montmorency, Cotte took orders and became vicar (1767), curé (1773), and oratory superior (1780) in Montmorency. In 1784 he went to Laon to serve as canon but was left without a post when the Revolution suppressed the canonry and bishopric of Laon. Cotte was then elected curé in Montmorency, a title he relinquished upon renouncing the priesthood to marry Antoinette-MarieMadeleine du Coudray in 1795. He spent four years (1798-1802) as assistant librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. The Royal Academy of Sciences had elected him correspondent in 1769, and in 1803 he became a member of the Institut de France. He was also a correspondent of the Paris Société d’Agriculture and was associated with over a dozen other societies, both French and foreign.
Cotte’s ecclesiastical career afforded him time, to cloister himself in his library, where he devoted himself to patient and scholarly collection and assimilation of meteorological data. He traveled little and lived in reclusive style; he did, however, carry on a vast correspondence and routinely recorded meteorological observations several times daily. Cotte made no startling contributions to the science of meteorology but was widely known' as a compiler, and he developed a reputation as an advocate of certain periodic meteorological correlations - e.g., among thermometric, barometric, magnetic, and lunar phenomena. Cotte’s insistence on the practical applicability of meteorological knowledge, and of scientific information generally, found an outlet in his publications of a popular nature on science and its uses. He believed agricultural utility to be the principal aim of meteorology, with medical application an important secondary purpose.
With a deep Baconian faith in the efficacy of fact-gathering, Cotte was a self-appointed clearinghouse for meteorological information, chronicler of the development of organized study of the weather, and propagandizer of the arrival of meteorology as a distinct science, an arrival that he attributed mainly to the recent development of reliable meteorological instruments. And yet, recognizing that he and his contemporaries had not yet established sound principles that could guide intelligent collection of meteorological data, Cotte contradicted his own wishful declarations by admitting that the efforts of his kind might have to serve the future of meteorology, if not its present.
At times appearing almost desperate for universal principles with which to link his assiduously gathered mountains of data and render them meaningful, Cotte nevertheless warned against undue application of the spirit of system, which could produce the illusion of general relationships that do not really exist. He presumed that statistically substantiated relations did not fall into this category. To Cotte, meteorology encompassed phenomena concerning earthquakes, aurora borealis, terrestrial magnetism, atmospheric electricity, and lunar periodicity, as well as temperature, atmospheric pressure, winds, and precipitation. He assumed regular affiliations within and among all these categories - relationships that merely awaited discovery. He sought, for example, regularities in the variation of barometric pressure with geographical location, as well as with changes in temperature, wind, and weather. Temperature he believed to be subject to correlation with the occurrence of disease. Cotte shared with Giuseppe Toaldo, Lamarck, and others a belief in a periodic lunar influence on the weather. He viewed the alleged nineteen-year cycle of repeating temperature conditions as the clearest case of lunar influence but thought others also were valid.
Regarding the essential sources of meteorological change, Cotte opposed the adherents of the “central fire” theory, maintaining instead that the greatest part of terrestrial heat emanates from the sun. When pressed to name the meteorological factor of most significance in alteration of the weather, Cotte upheld the primacy of the winds.
Cotte married Antoinette-Marie Madeleine du Coudray in 1795.