PHYSICS AND NATURAL HISTORY OF GENEVA. 249 



nor does it but in moderation; yet it does not fear, when the occasion 

 arises naturally, to broach them with freedom, for it is due to the 

 union which subsists between its members, to the kindly familiarity 

 which presides at its sessions, that it should indulge in discussion at 

 once perfectly free and perfectly courteous, equally remote from too 

 much compliance and too much insistence. Let us always preserve, 

 Gentlemen, this custom, consecrated by our predecessors, and although 

 I am far from proscribing men of genius, if our good fortune should 

 introduce such into our circle, let us at least avoid the reproach 

 which was attached to them of old, genus irritablle vatum. 



I have thus presented a summary of the transactions which have 

 occupied the nineteen sittings of the Society from July, 1858, to the 

 end of June, 1859. I have not entered into administrative details, 

 which have been few during the year, and which have consisted es- 

 sentially in some elections and the publication of the second part of the 

 14th volume of our memoirs. In the month of January, Professor Pictet 

 De la Rive was designated as vice-president, to become president from 

 July, 1859, to June, 1860. M. Edouard Claparede was elected secretary 

 for three years, succeeding M. Louis Soret, whose functions had 

 expired, and who had declined a re-election. You have provided, 

 lastly, by numerous nominations, for the places rendered vacant by 

 death in the ranks of our honorary members, and at the same time 

 limited to seventy the maximum number of those members. 



Our Society has never made pretension to offer its diplomas to all 

 the men who honor science by their labors; hence your choice has 

 fallen, as on previous occasions, only upon those among them who 

 have been kind enough to give us some testimony of their good will, 

 either directly or indirectly. 



I have said that death has made numerous vacancies among our 

 honorary members, and though it has not been our custom to speak 

 here of those whom we have thus lost, you will permit me, I am sure, 

 to make one exception in favor of the individual whom the whole 

 scientific world considered as its chief and honored as its presbyter. 



Alexander de Humboldt was the oldest of our honorary members; 

 the intimate relations which he had sustained with our two illustrious 

 compatriots, Marc-Auguste Pictet and Pyrarne De Candolle, had con- 

 stantly predisposed him favorably towards our society and towards all 

 the Genevese who were occupied with science. Having myself expe- 

 rienced his kindness, I still retain the impression of the friendly 

 reception which he extended to me at Berlin in April, 1858. I found 

 him then as I had known him thirty years before; his intellect had lost 

 nothing of its extent and clearness; his conversation was always as rich 

 and animated, his conceptions as lively and as rapid. I shall not 

 attempt to recount that long and noble life, nor even to sketch it: it 

 is a work of time which would be beyond my strength. I aspire but 

 to one thing, to render a modest but profound homage to that vast in- 

 telligence which touched on almost all the points of human knowledge, 

 and which has left monuments of its activity in every branch of the 

 sciences, physical and natural. What essentially characterized Hum- 



