716 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF HENRY MILNE-EDWARDS. 



Peace re- established, lie resumed liis course of instruction and the 

 publication of his great work. AVben the work was finished a well- 

 earned joy and reward awaited biin; bis scholars, friends and admirers, 

 under the leadership of M. de Quatrefages, presented him with a medal 

 of lionor. Milne-Edwards was then an octogenarian, crowned with 

 honor and years; be bad made bis literary debut in lS:2o, nearly sixty 

 years back, and, continuing bis labors for half a century, awaited the 

 end of bis mortal life with the serenity of a wise man, offering us this 

 beautiful example of a career that was active and useful to the last, 

 thus showing that the constant exercise of the intellectual jiowers, in- 

 stead of exhausting a man, sustains him beyond the common term of 

 years, and preserves him from decay by continually bringing bis facul- 

 ties into play in the strict fulfilment of daily duties. He also died, like 

 the Roman emperor, repeating that noble word, Lahorfmxts. 



II. — HIS SCIENTIFIC AVORK. 



The time has come to examine the scientific work of Milne-Edwards. 

 He was at the head of the French School of Natural History for many 

 years. The greater number of the scientists constituting that body 

 to-day were his pui)ils. It is necessary', then, to pass in review his spe- 

 cial works and those that in conjunction with this organization had 

 established his rei)utation, also to note his share in the scientific move 

 ment of his times and the general theories he supiwrted, without sup- 

 pressing the gaps in certain directions, due to his spirit of piccision in 

 practical matters, and perhaps to a kind of theoretical timidity that 

 characterized his conclusions. 



I will speak first of his special work. It was chiefly directed to the 

 study of marine aninmls, crustaceans, annelids, mollusks, and zoophytes. 

 This work, undertaken at the start in collaboration with Audouin, was 

 afterward pursued alone by Milne-Edwards, giving the impulse to a 

 vast series of zoological studies that have extended to our day with a 

 fecundity inexhaustible as life itself. Up to that time it was the custom 

 to study principally dead animals, dried or preserved in alcohol. The 

 inconvenience of this mode was perhaps less with terrestrial animals, 

 their shape being better defined and less affected by the great differ- 

 ence of density of their habitat. ^larine organisms are otherwise 

 affected ; their tissue and their organs, sustained during life by the water 

 in which they are submerged and scarcely differing from it in density, 

 are subject after death to great variations of fi)rm and dimension. Up 

 to that time there had also been a preference for the morphological 

 study of the liard parts or skeletons, such as the shells of mollusks, the 

 carapaces of crustaceans, the solid supports of radiates. The interior 

 organs, it is true, had been carefully examined after the method of 

 Cuvier, but this had been done with subjects preserved in liquids, 

 which distorted them, contracting and changing the greater part of 

 their tissues, not to speak of the dissolvent action of the liquids upon 



