DE CANDOLLE ON MEN OF SCIENCE. 4 i 



two cults as to the other names nearly equal. Thus, a rule of pure dis- 

 cipline, fopeign to the doctrines and which has not always existed in 

 the Church, has had bad consequences for science in Roman Catholic 

 countries. 



Classes of ideas, feelings, sympathies, and antipathies may be trans- 

 mitted in families by imitation or tradition, and have great influence 

 on the course of their members. They often result from some great 

 event which has made a marked impression on the family ; and we may 

 have among the number traditions favorable to the pursuit of science. 

 Pointed examples are afforded of them in the history of some of the 

 Protestant families who were expelled from Roman Catholic countries 

 in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Among these 

 are the nine Bernouillis, who were famous in mathematics or physics. 

 Of the men of this class there have been eleven of the one hundred 

 and one foreign associates of the French Academy an enormous pro- 

 portion for a total population of less than a million souls. If the same 

 proportion had ruled among, say, the Germans at large, we should 

 have had three hundred and thirty German foreign associates instead 

 of twenty-three ; or in the United Kingdom, one hundred and thirty 

 British associates instead of twenty-seven ; and ten of these eleven 

 lived in Switzerland. We might increase this number if we could 

 trace all the cases of descent from refugee mothers. The English 

 Puritans, who emigrated to this country, had essentially the same 

 dispositions and character with the French Protestant refugees of the 

 sixteenth century. Their descendants, direct and indirect, in New 

 England have also shown favorable tendencies toward sciences of 

 every kind. They have given Franklin and Rumford to the Euro- 

 pean academies and have furnished other distinguished men of 

 science and historians and men of letters in the United States. The 

 current immigration to the United States, being composed chiefly of 

 working-men, does not bear the promise of exercising influence on the 

 progress of science. But if every emigrant-vessel carried only one 

 such man as Nuttall, Agassiz, Engelmann, Marcou, or Pourtales, we 

 might expect different results. These men and others like them are 

 already laying the foundations of good scientific traditions, and are 

 adding their influence to that of the Pilgrims of New England. 



Public opinion is beneficial or not, according as it encourages or 

 gives the stamp of fashion to those tastes and aims which are con- 

 genial with scientific pursuits, or to the opposite ones. Form of gov- 

 ernment seems to exercise but little positive influence. Provided civ- 

 ilization is not destroyed by long seasons of revolutionary violence or 

 wars, there is no reason for supposing that scientific work will be 

 arrested in any country solely on account of its political regime. Cus- 

 toms are much more important, and also education and family tradi- 

 tions. The most favorable geographical situations are in the midst of 

 civilized nations, in the temperate zone. Science does not prosper in 



