SKETCH OF CLEMEN CE ROYER. 691 



notice. The first lecture was published under the title of an Intro- 

 duction to Philosophy, and brought most flattering praise to the 

 author from contemporary students. In an animated style the dis- 

 ciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of bold and ingenious 

 ideas, was already beginning to declare herself. In the meantime 

 she collaborated on the journal The New Economist, which the his- 

 torian and sociologist Pascal Duprat had just founded.* 



At the close of 1860, the Canton of Vaud having opened a com- 

 petition on the Principles of Taxation, " the little lady with a straw 

 hat," as her neighbors familiarly called her, handled the subject so 

 thoroughly that her memoir, entitled Theorie de VImpot et Dime 

 sociale (Theory of the Impost and Social Tithe, 1862), won her the 

 honor of dividing the prize with Proudhon. While not all the ideas 

 set forth in this work were new, she took care at least to co-ordinate 

 the systems of her predecessors, to select from the one and the other 

 of them what was good in them, and to condense into a homogeneous 

 whole works which were scattered hither and thither. But we will 

 pass over these books of her youth to dwell more at large on that part 

 of her work which will assure Madame Royer an honorable place 

 among the most zealous promoters and ablest defenders of the Dar- 

 winian theories. 



Her first effort in this line was to translate into French, in 1862, 

 the Origin of Species of the great English naturalist, preceding the 

 work with a preface which in itself alone constituted an excellent sum- 

 mary of the doctrine of evolution. She pointed out the results which 

 logically follow from the transformist theory. She did not conceal 

 from herself that in doing thus she would be the object of attacks 

 from the immobilist and ecclesiastical parties still so numerous thirty 

 years ago in all civilized countries; but she flattered herself, too, and 

 with just reason, that she would furnish the liberals and progressives 

 of France with a powerful weapon. In this introductory chapter 

 she characterized the original and strong personality of Darwin in 

 appropriate terms, saying: " While he has not the brilliant qualities 

 of a Cuvier as a writer or a professor, he is at least a worthy heir of 

 the profoundly philosophical science of the two Geoffroys Saint- 

 Hilaire . . . one of those workmen who cut their stone with an 



* Pascal Duprat, born at Hagetman (Department of the Landes), March 24, 1816, was 

 professor of history at Algiers and at Paris. He took the direction of the Revue indepen- 

 danle in 1847; founded with Lamennais the journal Le Peuple conttiluant, and was an 

 ardent promoter of the Revolution of 1848. Having became a member of the National 

 Assembly, he opposed the eoup d'etat of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Being obliged in con- 

 sequence of this act to exile himself, he retired to Belgium and afterward to Lausanne. 

 He did not return to France till after the war of 1870, and died in August, 1885. The 

 most interesting of his works is the Histoiical Essay on the Races of Africa (Essai histo- 

 rique sur les Races de VAfrique, 1845). 



