EULOGY OX AMPERE. 117 



had not succeeded in discovering their natural relations. On reaching 

 Brazil, where a large number of the species of this genus is found, M. de 

 Saint-Hilaire examined them with the serui)ulous care which gives so 

 much value to all his labors, and discovered their true affinities. Some 

 time after his return to France, M. de Saint-Hilaire, meeting M. Ampere 

 in society, after the usual interchange of civilities was addressed by him 

 in the following terms: "I found yesterday, while walking in a garden, 

 a begonia, and amused myself examining it. With what family do you 

 classify it!" " Since you have examined it, permit me to ask you how 

 you would classify it?" "I would place it in the adjoining group of 

 onagraircs,''^ replied M. Ampere. And, in fact, this was precisely the 

 idea a thorough examination, made on the very spot where the plant 

 grew naturally and in the open air, had suggested to M. de Saint-Hi- 

 laire. But our two colleagues were guilty of the error of not publish- 

 ing to the world the solution of a problem whose difficulty is de- 

 monstrated by the hesitation concerning it shown by de Jussieu. Ten 

 years later, after his own investigatious, Lindley assigned to the genjiis 

 Begonia the place it should properly occupy — the -place first indicated 

 by Ampere and M. Auguste de Saint-Hilaire. Does it not surprise you, 

 gentlemen, to find the name of a geometer thus associated with those 

 of distinguished botanists f 



Before the bloody catastrophe of Lyons, Ampere, then but eighteen 

 years of age, made a careful examination of his past life, and discov- 

 ered, he said, but three prominent points, but three circumstances, 

 whose influence on his future life was important and decided •. these 

 were, his first communion, the reading of the eulogy of Descartes by 

 Thomas, and finallj' — I foresee your surprise — the fall of the Bastile. 



From his first communion, our associate dates the existence of fixed 

 religious feeling ; from the reading of the eulogy of Descartes, his 

 taste, or rather his enthusiastic love for the study of mathematics, 

 physics, and philosophy ; and from the fall of the Bastile, the first 

 exultation of his soul at the names of liberty, human dignity, and phi- 

 lanthropy. The terrible death that snatched from the worthy family 

 of Poleymieux its venerated head was calculated to deaden for a time 

 the faculties of our associate, but there was no change wrought in his 

 convictions. From the moment his intellect was aroused from its slum- 

 ber, that devotion of mind and heart to the cause of civilization resumed 

 its sway. He scornfull^^ rejected the idea that the fury of a few demons — 

 that crimes — from which he had so cruelly suflered could arrest the pro- 

 gressive march of the world. 



The fertile mind with w hich nature had endowed the student of Poley- 

 mieux had been active from his earliest infancy ; but such, hovrever, 

 had not been the case with his senses. Those powerful instruments of 

 pleasure and of study were revealed to Ampere at a much later date — 

 at least in all the fullness of their power — and then by a kind of sudden re ve- 

 lationj which, on this account, seems not unworthy of being classed with 



