MICHEL EUGENE CHEYREUL. 457 



time to give heed to what he had to say. Indeed, it is by no means 

 easy, even if it be possible, to apprehend justly the import of some of 

 his later views and statements. It may well be questioned whether 

 the somewhat painful impression which must have been made upon 

 his grandchildren and great-grandchildren by many of the utterances 

 of Chevreul's last years does not explain the singular request made 

 by them to the French Academy, that no eulogy should be pronounced 

 upon their ancestor. 



In many notices which have been printed since Chevreul's death 

 stress has been laid, justly enough, upon the great influence which he 

 exerted in the field of industrial chemistry. All this is true. Few 

 men have had a wider influence than he for good in this department. 

 On the approach of his hundredth birthday, it was suggested that there 

 should be displayed to the public at the Garden of Plants specimens 

 of the various products of industry which had been made better by 

 means of his thoughts and studies. But this idea had to be given up, 

 because not even the large new hall of the Zoological Museum could 

 heve held all the materials which were oflfered for exhibition. In 

 point of fact, on his hundredth birthday there came marching with 

 banners into the great hall of the Museum, to do him honor, two thou- 

 S!and and more delegates from the learned societies, the schools, the 

 museums, and the workshops in whose behoof he had labored so faith- 

 fully during many useful years. It should be borne in mind, none the 

 less, that Chevreul was not an industrial chemist, in the modern ac- 

 ceptation of the term. It was not for money prizes that he lived and 

 labored. But the brilliant technical results which followed the publi- 

 cation of his researches showed to all men what stores of wealth may 

 be gained by the judicious application of scientific knowledge for the 

 correcting of rules of art. In recent days there has been no lack 

 of workers in this alluring field. 



It is a matter of history that the influences of the Revolution, and of 

 the succeeding long struggle between France and the rest of Europe, 

 gave more or less of a practical or economic bias to the minds 

 of most French teachers and scientific men of the period in which 

 Chevreul's youth was passed. With his fellows, he felt the influence 

 of the wars of the Revolution, and of the public feeling which found 

 expression in the Ecole Normale and the Ecole Polytechnique. In 

 this sense, it is true that he worked by preference upon subjects inti- 

 mately connected with the ordinary affairs of life ; but it should be 

 remembered of him that he was not only an accomplished chemist, 

 but always, from first to last, a thoroughly scientific man of an admi- 

 rable type. 



