MEMOIR OF HAUY. 385 



the intervention of all the personages who were likely to he of service. 

 Members of the Academy, and functionaries of the u Jar din du Roi," 

 did not hesitate to throw themselves at the feet of the ferocious men who 

 were conducting this frightful tragedy. An order of deliverance is 

 ohtained and home hy St. Hilaire to the prison. But he arrives a 

 little late in the day. Haiiy is so tranquil, so comfortable, that nothing 

 can determine him to leave that evening. The next morning it is 

 almost necessary to withdraw him hy force. One shudders to think 

 that the day after was the 2d of September ! 



It is a singular fact that from that time he was never molested. 

 Nothing certainly could have induced him to lend his countenance to 

 the extravagances of the period; but no one proposed to him to do so. 

 The simplicity and mildness of his manner and character seem to have 

 stood him in stead of all else. Once only was he summoned to appear 

 at the review of his hattalion, hut they cashiered him on the spot for 

 his awkward appearance. This was nearly all that he knew, or at 

 least saw, of the revolution. The convention, at a time when it was 

 proceeding with the most violence, named him a memher of the Com- 

 mission of Weights and Measures, and Keeper of the Cabinet of Mines. 

 And when Lavoisier was arrested, and Borda and Delambre dismissed, 

 it was Haiiy, a recusant priest, discharging every day his ecclesiastical 

 functions, who alone found himself in a position to write in their behalf, 

 and who did so without hesitation and without incurring inconvenience. 

 Considering the time, there is even more cause to wonder at his impu- 

 nity than his courage. 



It was at the Cabinet of Mines, and on the invitation and with the 

 aid of the enlightened administration of that department, that Haiiy 

 prepared his principal work, the treatise on mineralogy. Having at 

 his disposal a vast collection, to which minerals were consigned from all 

 quarters, and at the same time the services of the young and ardent 

 scholars of the polytechnic school, (more than one of whom have since 

 become eminent mineralogists,) Haiiy promptly retrieved the time con- 

 sumed in other labors, and in a few years reared that admirable mon- 

 ument of which it may be said that it effected for France what retarded 

 circumstances had accomplished for the author himself; having at once 

 restored that country, after long years of neglect, to the first rank in 

 this division of natural history. This work unites, indeed, two advant- 

 ages which seldom meet : the first, that it is founded on an original dis- 

 covery, entirely due to the genius of the author ; the second, that this 

 discovery is followed up and applied with unexampled perseverance, 

 even to the most minute mineral varieties. All is grand in the plan ; 

 all is precise and rigorous in the details. It is complete; like the doc- 

 trine itself of which it contains the exposition. 



Of the departments of natural history, mineralogy, whose objects are 

 the least numerous and least complicated, is that, notwithstanding, 

 which yields itself least readily to a rational classification. 



The first observers distributed and named the minerals vaguely from 

 their external appearance and use. Only towards the middle of the 

 eighteenth century was the attempt made to submit them to the methods 

 which had rendered such service to zoology and botany ; though in 

 thus aiming to establish among them genera and species as among 



25 



