MICHEL EUGENE CHEVREUL. 453 



With Cuvier and with Ampere, as he tells us, he was accustomed 

 to hold unending friendly debates upon plans of classification and 

 upon the aims and methods of scientific research. Years after Chev- 

 reul had been left the sole survivor of the chemists of his time, he 

 was accustomed, in his lectures at the Gobelins, to make fond allu- 

 sion to the works of these men, almost as if they had been still alive. 

 Chenevix, also, as he assured us, " was a very conscientious man, with 

 immense encyclopedic knowledge." 



It is said that Chevreul's early education was carefully looked to 

 by his father, who was a distinguished physician. Between the ages 

 of eleven and seventeen the boy studied at the Ecole Centrale of 

 Angers. He then went to Paris, where he immediately attracted 

 the attention of his teachers. When twenty years old he was 

 assistant in charge of Vauqueliu's laboratory, and teacher in a 

 scientific school which Fourcroy had founded. In this same year, 

 1806, he began to publish scientific papers, and before ten more 

 years had passed it was recognized by every one that he had gained 

 a place in the foremost rank of chemists. In 1810 he was appointed 

 assistant naturalist at the Garden of Plants, and he subsequently 

 succeeded to the Chair of Chemistry at the Garden, which had been 

 occupied, successively, by Geoffroy, the Brothers Rouelle, Lemery, 

 Macquer, Fourcroy, and Vauquelin. It is noticeable that no small 

 part of Chevreul's woi'k related to subjects in the domain of natural 

 history, and that he published many papers in the Annales and 

 Meraoires of the Museum. In 1816 he was appointed Professor of 

 Chemistry at the Gobelins, and director of its dye-houses. In 1826 

 he became a member of the Fi-ench Academy of Sciences and a 

 foreign honorary member of the Royal Society of London. 



As a chemist, Chevreul investigated a great variety of substances, 

 ranging from the sugar of diabetes and the oxidation products of 

 cork, on the one hand, to compounds of tungsten, uranium, and 

 zirconium, on the other. He edited several scientific journals also, 

 and contributed articles to encyclopcedias and dictionaries of science 

 and of tectinology. As an example of work of this kind may be 

 cited a review written by him, in 1822, of a French translation of Sir 

 Humphry Davy's Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry. This review 

 is well wortli reading to-day, and it has a certain historic interest, 

 since it marks better even than the Lectures themselves the very 

 considerable progress which had been made at that early period by 

 chemists who sought to classify and explain the phenomena of vege- 

 table growth by referring them to scientific principles. 



