EULOGY ON AMPERE. 113 



■whom it is siiri^rising to find, notwithstanding his unquestionable talent 

 in so brilliant a company. The principal study of the young- student of 

 Poleymieux was the encyclopedia in alphabetical order, in twenty vol- 

 umes in folio. Each one of these twenty volumes had separately its 

 turn, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so on to 

 the end, without once interrupting the arithmetical order. 



Nature had endowed Ampere, to an extraordinary degree, with the 

 faculty Plato so aptly, and not too extravagantly, describes as "a great 

 and powerful goddess." Thus this colossal work was completely and 

 deeply engraved on the mind of our friend. Each one of us has heard 

 this member of the Academy of Sciences, at a somewhat advanced 

 age, repeat, with perfect accuracy, long i:)assages from the encyclopedia, 

 relating to blazonry, falcomy, etc., which a half century before he had 

 read amidst the rocks of Poleymieux. His mysterious and wonderful 

 memory, however, astonishes me a thousand times less than that force 

 united to flexibility, which enables the mind to assimilate, without con- 

 fusion, after reading in alphabetical order, matter so astonishingly va- 

 ried as that in the large dictionary of d'Alembert and Diderot. I will 

 ask you to glance with me over the first pages of the encyclopedia. I 

 mention the first pages as I prefer not to choose, that our admiration 

 may be spontaneous. 



To begin : The preposition a fills the reader's mind with nice gram- 

 matical distinctions; ah transports him to the Hebrew calendar; abadir 

 to the midst of the mythological histories of Cybele and Saturn. The 

 word ahaissement (depression) carries him at times into algebra, to the 

 reduction of the degrees of equations ; into one of the most difficult 

 problems of geodesy and the nautical art, when required to determine the 

 depression of the horizon at sea; and to herahby, Mvhen al)atcment deaig- 

 nates the peculiar signs added to the arms of families when necessary 

 to debase their bravery and dignity. Turning the page the article ahhe 

 will enlighten you as to all that is fickle and capricious in the ecclesias- 

 tical discipline. The next word, abscess, carries you into surgery. To 

 the description of the anatomical organization of bees, {alcellcs,) of their 

 mode of living and reproduction, of their habits, of the hierarchical or- 

 ganization of the hive, succeeds almost immediately the explanation of 

 the immortal and subtile discovery of Bradley; of those annual move- 

 ments of the stars, which, under the name of aberration, demonstrate 

 that the earth is a planet. Some lines further on you fall into the abyss 

 of cosmogony. Abacadabra plunges you into necromancy. 



This, then, is the kind of reading that a child of thirteen or fourteen 

 undertook, or rather planned, for himself without finding it too severe 

 a task. I shall have more than one example to give of the strength of 

 Ampere's mind. None, however, more remarkable than the one I am 

 about to relate. 



As the modest library of a retired merchant could no longer satisfy 

 the young student, his fiither took him from time to time to Lyons, where 



