MEMOIR OF TYRAMUS DE CANDOLLE. 275 



his excursions, he would have promptly renounced the professorship. 

 Fortunately for Montpellier, M. Cretet, minister of the interior, when 

 consulted on the difficulty, replied, "Let M. De Candolle choose: he 

 shall either have both the places, or neither one nor the other." And 

 a few days after the same dignitary gave even more distinct expres- 

 sion to his high estimate of De Candolle, though still couched under 

 the brisk form of a sally. M. Laplace having called on him in com- 

 pany with De Candolle, and wishing to give in some way expression 

 to the high esteem he entertained for the latter, had said to the minister, 

 "Your excellency does us an ill turn; we had hoped to have soon had 

 M. De Candolle at the Institute." "Ah, your Institute ! your Insti- 

 tute!" exclaimed M. Cretet. And while Laplace looked at him with 

 surprise, he added, "Do you know that I sometimes feel inclined to 

 order a battery of guns to be pointed against your Institute? Yes, a 

 battery, in order to disperse the members throughout France. Is it 

 not deplorable to see all the luminaries congregated in Paris, and the 

 provinces in ignorance? I send M. de Candolle to Montpellier to 

 carry thither the spirit of activity." 



In effect, the influence and efforts of De Candolle soon infused life 

 into all the studies of Montpellier. The spirit of Linnaeus reigned 

 there almost exclusively; and unfortunately, by the spirit of Linnams 

 must here be understood the spirit of artificial methods.* All the 

 labors of the last half of the eighteenth century, all the new philosophy 

 of science, all the grand ideas elaborated by the Adansons, the 

 Jussieus, the Cuviers, had remained unknown or disregarded. Hence 

 the lessons of De Candolle had all the freshness of novelty for this 

 isolated province; those admirable lessons, which afterwards repro- 

 duced in three great works, have afforded valuable instruction to all 

 Europe, 



These three works are the Theorie Elementaire de la Botomquc, the 

 Organographies and the Pliysiologie Vegetale. Of these, the first, pub- 

 lished in 1813, is the most important, for it was in this that the 

 author laid the first foundations of his general theory of the organiza- 

 tion of beings. 



Every age seems to impose on itself the solution of some new 

 problem; thus, as regards the phenomena of life, the eighteenth 

 century was chiefly engaged with the problem of methods and the 

 problem of the revolutions of the globe. The question of methods, so 

 ably discussed in the seventeenth century by Tournefort and Ray, in 

 the eighteenth by Linnaeus, Adanson, and Bernard de Jussieu, finds 

 its solution, towards the end of the latter century, through the 

 labors of Laurent de Jussieu and Georges Cuvier. The question of 

 the revolutions of the globe commences in 1575, with some specula- 

 tions of the potter, Bernard Palissy; two centuries afterwards Buffon 



c " They had heen introduced there by Saurages, and directly applied by him to the regular 

 classification of maladies by classes, genera and species See his Nosologia 31ethodica, a re- 

 markable work for the time at which it appeared In justice to Linnaeus, it should be 

 observed that no one better understood than he the different parts assigned to the natural 

 and the artificial methods, nor better marked the characters which distinguished them. — 

 Author. 



