CHEVREUL AT A HUNDRED. 39 



studies in saponification, and had given to the world star or adaman- 

 tine candles, which were a greater improvement over the tallow-dips 

 and dim lamps which the common people of that day had to get along 

 with than the electric light is over our gas-lights and petroleum- 

 lamps. 



An item recently appeared in the newspapers saying that the other 

 day his Excellency Tcheou-Meou-Ki, Director of the Chinese Mission of 

 Public Instruction, paid a visit, with the mandarins attached to his per- 

 son, to 31. Chevreul in Paris. He handed to the illustrious chemist a 

 Chinese document expressing in old characters every wish for his hap- 

 piness and long life. It appears that there is living at this moment in 

 China a Chinese savant who at the age of one hundred years has just 

 passed his examination, and been admitted a member of the highest 

 academy of the mandarins. The interpreter explained to M. Chevreul 

 that his Chinese visitors considered that the fact that two savants a 

 hundred years of age were living, one in France and the other in China, 

 was a link connecting the learning of the two countries. 



A correspondent of the " Pall Mall Gazette " recently visited M. 

 Chevreul in his study bedroom at nine o'clock in the evening. He 

 found him in bed, reading a play of Moliere's, "and as cheery and 

 hearty as a young man of twenty. He has decidedly an ancient 

 look about him. His skin is well furrowed and wrinkled, and his hand 

 shaky ; but his eyes are not dim, nor is his natural mental strength 

 abated. His memory is something marvelous. He remembered the 

 hoi-rors and bloody clays of the Terror as vividly as the struggles and 

 rise of the Third Republic." He talked about the theatres, Shake- 

 speare, and Moliere, whom, like a true Frenchman, he preferred, and 

 added : "I don't know if among the English there is the same admira- 

 tion for the classics as in France. We have always professed a great 

 love for the classics, but the word ' classic ' is too often applied to 

 things that have nothing classic about them. Then we have other 

 schools, the romantic and others. But I don't find much in recent 

 writers. They have got a great many new words, but work on the old 

 ideas. They keep on reproducing the old ideas over and over again, 

 and do not give us many new thoughts." And he repeated several 

 times, " It is very easy to give new names to very old things." 



The old man, says the correspondent, " prattled on from one sub- 

 ject to another, speaking slowly and distinctly. ' We have in France,' 

 he observed, ' a school that has a considerable number of adherents 

 who say that man was descended from the monkeys. But if you ac- 

 cept that doctrine, you do away w T ith the perfectibility of species.' M. 

 Chevreul does not always lie in bed and read Moliere. Until last De- 

 cember he went about as well as he had done fifty years before. Now 

 he goes about the garden and the museums, attends the Academy of 

 Sciences every week, and frequently reads papers ; goes regularly to 

 the meetings of the Agricultural Society and the offices of the ' Jour- 



