2 Baron Cuvier's Historical Eloge of Baron Ramond. 



word, it is in the details of an agitated life that ^e shall find 

 the necessary commentary on the most learned of his works. 

 You will not be astonished then to hear me recal the events 

 of general history in which M. Bamond took a part, and of 

 which he had been the victim, because they are almost always 

 the events which were the cause of his discoveries. 



From his very infancy, from his origin itself, we perceive in 

 some degree the germ of what he has been. His father, Pierre 

 Ramond, treasurer extraordinary of the wars in Alsace, was 

 originally from the south of France. His mother, Maria 

 Eisentraut, belonged to a German family on the left bank of 

 the Rhine; and it was partly the persecutions exercised 

 against the protestants, and partly the melancholy devasta- 

 tions which the French armies committed at the two seizures 

 of the Palatinate in 1674 and in 1689, which had fixed 

 these two families in Alsace; so that uniting in himself the 

 lively and ardent nature of the inhabitants of the South, 

 with that disposition to meditation, that perseverance, so com- 

 mon among the German people, that M. Ramond derived from 

 the recollections of his ancestors the horror of an arbitrary 

 government, and the consequences which it brings along with 

 it, even when, as it rarely happens, it is in the hands of a 

 monarch so penetrating, so well informed, in his affairs, and 

 of such greatness of mind as Louis XIV. undoubtedly was. 



Strasburg was perhaps the place most favourable to the 

 developement of these dispositions. On taking possession of 

 that city, France had guaranteed to them the preservation of 

 their internal government, and there were found there all the 

 complicated forms of the republics of the middle age. Its 

 University, organized like those of Germany, and consequent- 

 ly aflbrding the most varied and extended instruction, enjoyed 

 great celebrity from the talents of Schoepflin for those studies 

 which relate to diplomacy and public law. Here were assem- 

 bled tlie sons ot the greatest houses of Germany and the 

 north ; and M. Ramond had for the companions of his studies 

 the men who have performed in our day the most conspicu- 

 ous parts in Europe. 



The various branches of law were little less than an amuse- 

 ment to a mind so active, and he found time to study Natural 



