8 Transactions of the Societij. 



at this period, a difficulty which was later removed by the loan of 

 the Microscope to which I shall have occasion to refer in another 

 place (see p. 10). This instrument was at his service after the 

 migration of the family to La Eochelle, which took place in 1820, 

 as above related/ Once established at La Eochelle, the elder 

 Orbigny was more closely associated with Fleuriau de Bellevue, 

 and whilst still practising medicine he devoted himself to a study 

 of the flora and fauna, both zoological and geological, of the 

 district, and it is due to the efforts of these two ardent naturalists 

 that the first local Museum in France, that of La Eochelle, was 

 founded in 1835.^ He corresponded with naturalists in Paris 

 and elsewhere, furnishing them with local specimens. Latreille, 

 in his Eeport on the " Tableau Me'thodique " (vide post, p. 20), 

 takes occasion to say of Alcide, that " he was influenced by the 

 example, the encouragement and the instructions of a father who, 

 not less expert in his profession of Medicine than in Natural 

 History, was entrusted with the organization of the Museum of 

 La Eochelle . . . and who earned by his services the title of 

 Correspondent of the Natural History Museum of Paris, and with 

 whom your Eeporting Commissioner has for a long time been in 

 communication on matters relating to the progress of entomology." 

 Both Alcide and his brother Charles accompanied their father in 

 his scientific rambles, and as Fischer has observed, " they thus 

 learned to seek and observe, and their precocious talent as 

 draughtsmen found occasion for its exercise at every step." ^ 

 The elder d'Orbigny died at La Eochelle in 1856, aged eighty-six ; 

 his biographer says of him, " Poet, musician, agriculturist, doctor, 

 naturalist, he was in himself a living encyclopaedia. If, less 

 anxious to embrace all knowledge, he had specialized more, he 

 would have without doubt gained for himself a still greater 

 celebrity." * 



Charles d'Orbigny, the younger brother by four years of 

 Alcide, born like him at Coueron (December 12, 1806), became a 

 physician in Paris, where he was a medical student during the 

 cholera epidemic of 1832; but in 1833 he published a " Tableau 

 synoptique du regne vegetal applique a la medecine," a work 

 almost aa ambitious for a youth of twenty-seven, as was his 

 brother's " Tableau Methodique " for a youth of twenty-three. 

 He became assistant to Cordier, Professor of Geology at the 

 Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, and published many works that 

 do not concern us. His magnum opus was the "Dictionnaire 

 universelle d'Histoire Naturelle " in sixteen volumes, to which all 

 the leading naturalists of the day contributed, and in which Alcide 

 d'Orbigny wrote an important article on the Foraminifera 



' XXIV., p. 355. "- XXI., p. 434 ; XXIV., p. 355. 



3 XXI., p. 434. * XXII., p. 2. 



