SKETCH OF PAUL BERT. 401 



SKETCH OF PAUL BERT. 



IN Paul Bert we have an. example of a man wlio was able to 

 achieve equal eminence in scientific research and in political 

 life; and one of those extremely rare cases in which the excel- 

 lence of scientific achievement was not apparently marred by the 

 worker's participation in political activity. Announcing his death 

 in the Chamber of Deputies, in November, 1886, M. de Freycinet 

 said, " The members of the Chamber lose in him an eminent col- 

 league, science one of its most illustrious representatives, and the 

 Government an inestimable fellow-laborer in whom it had placed 

 entire confidence/' 



M. Bert was born at Auxerre, on the 17th of October, 1833. 

 He pursued his studies in his native town and in Paris, and ob- 

 tained the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1863. His graduating 

 thesis was upon animal grafting, and in it, M. Gaston Tissan- 

 dier says, the physiologist marked himself as an eminently origi- 

 nal investigator and skillful experimenter. Three years after- 

 ward, in 1866, he was admitted as a Doctor in Natural Science on 

 the basis of a thesis upon the " Vitality of the Animal Tissues." 

 His first labors attracted attention particularly by the interesting 

 and curious nature of the results obtained. Animal grafting, an 

 operation consisting of the removal of a living part and trans- 

 planting it so that it shall continue to live on another part of the 

 same individual or on another individual, was studied in a special 

 manner by the young physiologist, who was enabled thereby to 

 shed a new light on the properties of the nerves. This was re- 

 marked by Claude Bernard, in whose laboratory he became an 

 assistant, who discerned an ingenious mind in him, and predicted 

 the brilliant future that awaited him. In 1865 the Academy of 

 Sciences decreed to M. Bert the prize in Experimental Physiology. 

 Two years later, in 1867, he was appointed to a chair in the Fac- 

 ulty of Sciences at Bordeaux; and in December, 1869, he was 

 named Professor of Physiology in the Faculty of Sciences in 

 Paris, as Bernard's successor. Here, in the possession of a vast 

 field of study, M. Bert, with the financial aid of Dr. Jourdanet, 

 constructed costly and magnificent apparatus for the execution of 

 experiments on barometric pressure in relation to the effects it ex- 

 erts on the organism. Dr. Jourdanet, having removed from the 

 borders of the Gulf of Mexico to the highlands of Anahuac, had 

 observed differences in pathological conditions, which he discov- 

 ered, to his surprise, were not simply such as result from tempera- 

 ture or are paralleled in places of lower level and higher latitude, 

 but presented peculiarities which he conceived to be dependent on 

 the elevation of the situation alone. Among these conditions was 



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