in the Lancet on November 20, 1886, shortly after his death, there is 

 no mention of La pression barometrique and little to suggest that 

 Bert was a great physiologist. 



Born at Auxerre on October 17, 1833, Paul Bert received his 

 early education in the Department of Yonne. He had chosen en- 

 gineering for his profession and had entered the College de St. 

 Barbe with a view to preparing for the polytechnic school. He was 

 dissuaded from this in favor of the law and passed his bar exam- 

 inations successfully. But he soon found the law boring to his 

 inquisitive mind and, for the third time, modified his course of 

 study on becoming acquainted with Gratiolet, the Director of the 

 Anatomical Museum in Paris. He eventually obtained his M.D. 

 degree in 1863 at the age of thirty. During his years at Paris he 

 had come under the influence of Claude Bernard in whose labora- 

 tory he served as an assistant. Bernard recognized his ingenious 

 mind and predicted a brilliant future. His thesis, published in 

 1866, on the grafting of animal tissues, attracted wide notice, and 

 it won for Bert in 1865 the prize in experimental physiology offered 

 by the Academie des Sciences. After teaching zoology for several 

 years at the Faculte des Sciences at Bordeaux, he was appointed in 

 December 1869 as Bernard's successor to the Chair of Physiology 

 at the Faculte des Sciences at Paris. Bernard at the time occupied 

 two chairs, one at the Sorbonne, the other at the Faculte, and he 

 resigned the latter to make place for his brilliant pupil. 



During the last two years of the Second Empire, Paul Bert made 

 himself conspicuous in the political world by his uncompromising 

 republicanism and at the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty in 1870, he 

 was rewarded by Gambetta with the Prefecture du Nord. Elected 

 Deputy in 1871, he became noted for his constant opposition to re- 

 ligious congregation, which led eventually to the decrees of expul- 

 sion against the Jesuits, Dominicans and other orders. He was in- 

 sistent that the state schools should be taught not by nuns and 

 friars, but by non-sectarian personnel. In 1881 he was made Min- 

 ister of Public Instruction in Gambetta's famous Grand Ministere, 

 but he fell with his chief after an ephemeral exercise of power. 



Following the death of Gambetta, Bert's political influence was 

 on the wane and he returned to his scientific pursuits, obtaining a 

 vacant chair in the Academie des Sciences. At the beginning of the 

 year, the attention of the French Government was forcibly drawn 

 to the highly unsatisfactory state of affairs in French Indo-China's 

 Province of Tongking, and it decided to send out a Resident Gen- 

 eral vested with special powers to effect a thorough reorganization. 



VI 



