MEMOm OF C. F. BEAUTEMPS-BEAUPRE. 



BY M. ELIE DE BEAUMONT, 



ERPETUAL SECRETARY 0F THE FRENCH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



TRANSLATED FOR THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION BY C. A, ALEXANDER. 



To this Academy no species of scientific renown is alien; and if sucli men as 

 la Perouse, d'Eutrecasteaux, Baudin, Diimont d'Urville, have disappeared 

 from the stage of the world without having been numbered in its ranks, it was 

 because an inauspicious destiny arrested their career. Their place here was 

 already marked. To have obtained it would have been to them, next to the 

 consciousness of duty fulfilled, the highest of gratifications. To you, gentle- 

 men, the privilege of crowning their memorable labors by your suffrages would 

 have been a subject of the most just self-congratulation. Those labors death, 

 which has snatched away their authors, has not withdrawn from your domain. 

 It is still grateful to you to extol them, and your committee has concurred with 

 me in thinking that I could prefer no better claim to your fiivorable attention 

 than by attempting to retrace, on this occasion, the life of a colleague who knew 

 how to obtain and to justify all your sympathies, and whose name invariably 

 recalls those of the heroes of hydrography we have named, of whom he was, 

 with better fortunes and not less daring, the companion, the rival, or the master. 



Charles-Fran Qois Beautemps-Beaupre was born August 6, 1766, at Neuville 

 au Pont, a village situated one league north of Sainte Menehold, in that part 

 of Champagne which now forms the department of the Marne. His father was 

 an unpretending tiller of the soil, and the young Francois, who seemed destined 

 to cultivate, in his turn, the rather prosaic fields of that worthy coimtry, passed 

 his first years in youthful sports on the pleasant hills which, branching from 

 the Argonne, agreeably diversify the banks of the Aisne. His constitution, 

 naturally robust, and strengthened by country exercise, received on one occa- 

 sion a severe shock. While heedlessly playing with the rope of the parochial 

 bell he fell with violence, and sustained such injuries of the head as to make 

 trepanning necessary. The operation was no doubt skilfully performed, for 

 the young sufferer became, with advancing years, a man of tall stature, of a 

 noble and expressive mien, and retained, for nearly eighty years, the use of the 

 exalted faculties which won him a place in this assemblage. I have not been 

 able to recover the name of the modest provincial surgeon to whom, under 

 Providence, our colleague was indebted for life and intelligence, and who, per- 

 haps, never knew the full value of the head he had been instrumental in re- 

 storing. 



M. Beautemps-Beaupre passed, indeed, only the years of childhood at his 

 native village. Among his relations Avas an eminent geographer, M. Jean Nico- 

 las Buache, the head of a geographical establishment derived by collateral in- 

 heritance from the family of Delisle — a family wholly devoted to science, and 

 known, through more than a century, for its connexion with almost every pub- 

 lication relating to geography, astronomy, and the marine. M. Buache, visit- 



