AUGUSTIN-PYRAMUS DE CANDOLLE. 295 
et ne sais pas méme s’il s’est apercu de cette petite malice.. Je dois 
dire que je ne prétendis point, méme alors, que se fit un plagiat 
volontaire, mais il arrive souvent dans les sciences qu’on s’appropie, 
sans s’en douter, ce qu’on a entendu dire. 
“Cette circonstance éveilla ma propre attention sur la justice ri- 
goureuse que j’ai désiré rendre a tous: la force de ma mémoire, et 
surtout le soin que j’ai eu trés-jeune de noter les faits et les idées 
nouvelles que j’entendais dans la conversation, m’ont mis 4 méme de 
pouvoir, bien des années aprés une conversation, citer exactement 
celui de qui j’avais appris un fait ou une opinion quelconque. Cette 
habitude de justice m’a fait beaucoup d’amis, et j’ai eu souvent des 
remerciements de gens cités par moi, qui eux-mémes avaient oublié 
ce quils m’avaient dit.” (pp. 91, 92.) 
To De Candolle’s credit it must be said, not only that his 
career was remarkably free from controversies about priority 
and reclamations, but that his example and precepts, his seru- 
pulous care to render due credit to every contributor, his re- 
spect for unpublished names communicated to his own or 
recorded in other herbaria, and the like, have been most 
influential in establishing both the law and the ethics which 
prevail in systematic botany (more fully, or from an earlier 
period than in the other departments of natural history), 
and which have secured such general codperation and harmo- 
nious relations among its votaries. 
In these early days De Candolle was a good deal occupied 
with vegetable physiology; the results are contained in his 
papers ‘‘on the pores in the bark of leaves,” 7. e. stomata; on 
the vegetation of the Mistletoe ; and on his experiments rela- 
tive to the influence of light on certain plants, mainly those 
which exhibit strikingly the change in the position of their 
leaves at night, which has been called the sleep of plants. The 
account of these experiments, in which he caused certain plants 
to acknowledge an artificial night and day, when read before 
the Institute, gave him considerable eclat, —and probably 
also the compliment of being named one of the three candi- 
dates to fill the vacancy in the Academy of Sciences left by 
the death of L’Heritier. A mere compliment, for the contest, 
of course, was between Labillarditre and Beauvois. In the 
