From the description of him on Wikipedia, I am certain it is the former, although the bone wedrifid picks with "composed" is symptomatic of where he falls short of his contemporary, Voltaire. He was a most refined, civilised, intelligent, and educated writer, very popular among the intellectual class, and achieved memberships of distinguished academic societies, but his strength, a great one indeed, was in writing well on what was already known, and he created little that was new. Voltaire's name lives to this day, but Fontenelle's, while important in his time, does not.

Scholarship is indeed a virtue, but Fontenelle's was not in service of a higher goal.