ON A. LAURENT DE .TUSSIEU. 49 



already reckons so many victims, antl enumerates them in 

 nearly all parts of the workl, a kind of heroism almost pecu- 

 liar to modern times. Detained at first by the curiosity that 

 such rich and novel regions might well inspire, subsequently 

 hindered from departing by the natives of the country, who 

 being attacked by a severe epidemic, wei'e most unwilling to 

 lose the services of an able physician, he did not revisit the 

 land of his birth till after thirty years of the severest fatigues, 

 when worn out alike in body and mind, having even lost all 

 recollection of what he had done, he too well justified by his 

 labours and misfortunes the title that Condorcet bestowed 

 upon him of the Martyr to Botany. 



Of these three brethren, the only one who exercised a 

 powerful influence on Botany, and through Botany on Natu- 

 ral History in general, was Bernard. He it was who, while 

 all the other French botanists, beginning by his brother 

 Antoine, were timidly following the traces of Tournefort, 

 opened to himself a new path in which there was no prede- 

 cessor, and in which none was to go farther than his nephew, 

 M. Laui'ent de Jussieu, the subject of the present memoir. 



Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, the nephew and worthy fol- 

 lower of Bernard, was born at Lyons, the 12th April, 1748. 

 As soon as he had completed his earlier studies, his uncle 

 sent for him to Paris, where he arrived in 1765, at seventeen 

 years of age. Thus did he find himself at once placed beside 

 the individual who had swayed the sceptre of Botany in 

 France ever since the time of Tournefort, and whose only 

 European rival was Linnaeus, — a wonderful man, whose name 

 was filling the learned world, and who had written nearly 

 nothing. But if Bernard de Jussieu had written little, he 

 had thought much; he had passed his life in meditating on 

 one of those questions which unravel all the other questions 

 of a science ; he solved the problem of the Method m Natural 

 History, and had done so during a period when efforts of all 

 kinds had strikingly advanced the human mind. 



At the time when the younger Jussieu came to his uncle, 

 Antoine had just died ; Joseph was yet in Peru, and the ilius- 



Vol. III.— No. 17. 11 



