166 EULOGY ON AMPERE. 



bage from lettuce iu my garden ; and I understand still less of traffic; 

 and my knowledge of merchandise is more limited still." 



Ampere, who was a very skillful botanist, would never have confounded 

 cabbage with lettuce, but he was as little skilled as the philosopher of 

 Pingueux in trafiic and merchandise, which is shown by the astonish- 

 ment he expressed when wishing to initiate himself somewhat into the 

 details of his little household ; he saw fifty francs for parsley iu the ex- 

 pense of a month, and six hundred francs for the whole year. 



This, then, nevertheless, is the man who, for more than a quarter of 

 a century, received each year as inspector-general of the university the 

 mission of controlling the expenses of our ijriucipal colleges ;" and think 

 not he was better qualified to examine the professors and scholars, for, 

 once excited, his ardent imagination would straightway overleap the 

 boundaries of classic theories. A word in jest or seriousness would 

 often hurry him into unknown paths, which he would explore with the 

 most surprising clearness, utterly unconscious of his surroundings. It 

 was in this way that year after year the theory of Avignon, the de- 

 monstration of Grenoble, the proposition of Marseilles, and the theorem 

 of Moutpellier, enriched his public lectui'cs delivered at the polytechnic 

 school and college of France ; but this habit of our friend of distin- 

 guishing each of his conceptions by the name of the place where it 

 originated, makes us fear that he did not give at Avignon, Grenoble, 

 Marseilles, and Moutpellier that individual attention that duty required 

 of the examiner. 



If Ampere little suited the office of inspector-general of the uni- 

 versity I can assert the office as little suited him, for his domestic re- 

 sponsibilities, a beneficence often exceeding the limits of prudence, at 

 times, too, when his friends were anxiously calculating hoio much his 

 icants exceeded his means, the extravagant habit of altering unnec- 

 essarily the proofs of the printing-office, his endless desire for the con- 

 struction of new apparatus for electro-magnetism, prevented Ampere 

 from resigning the principal source of a modest income. So far from 

 this, every year when the offices were distributed in the bureaus of the 

 university, did we see our friend submit with resignation to the busi- 

 ness of a solicitor to obtain a position which might injure his health and 

 could not add more than a hundred francs to his doiuestic economj^, and 

 waste in painful, humiliating, and frequently fruitless efforts his most 

 precious time. 



Finally, he departs, and for three or four months the author of the subtle 

 theories of electro-dynamics goes from department to department, from city 

 to city, from college to college, contending with a parcel of wretched chil- 

 dren. Whole days are passed hearing them decline, conj ugate, and explain 

 passages from f7eyi>-/6" and the metamorphoses, or iu detaining them before 

 the so much dreaded black-board, where they stammer over the certainly 

 ver\' harmless, but very i^rosaic, rules of multiplication, division, and 

 the extract of roots. The hour of return has also its tribulations of 



