298 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
everything, made him skillful in every function; he brought to it 
method, order, facility for administration, a knowledge of details 
and of the whole, a sincere love of justice, and a disinterestedness 
which caused him to be noticed and admired. 
“Cuvier might justly be compared to Haller, whom he resembled 
as much as the difference of nation and time would allow. Both 
astonished by their extraordinary capacity for learning, knowing 
equally well natural and historical science, greedy of positive facts 
on all subjects, endowed with wonderful memory and a remarkable 
spirit of order, capable of great labor, and yet gifted with much fa- 
cility. But at the side of these admirable qualities it might be 
observed that neither had an inventive genius; they observed facts 
well, but never thought to unite them by a theory that would divine 
or discover others. Their characters corresponded even outside of 
science: both loved power, and sacrificed precious time to the desire 
of political advancement; both loved reading to a passion, even at 
the hours destined ordinarily for meals and domestic intercourse ; 
both were cold and haughty in conversation with those who inspired 
them with no interest, piquant and profound to those whom they 
thought worthy of it; finally both had a certain contempt for that 
class of ideas called liberal, and held to the aristocratic party. The 
great size of their heads gave them a certain physical resemblance. 
In one word, it would be difficult to find two celebrated men more 
exactly alike, and the lovers of metempsychosis might say, if the 
epochs would permit, that the soul of Haller had passed without 
change into the body of Cuvier. 
“To me personally, Cuvier was wellnigh perfection. . . . Not- 
withstanding the great difference in our respective views of life and 
of politics, and even of science in some theoretical matters, our in- 
timacy was never clouded, nor was it disturbed by his quarrel with 
Geoffroy, although he knew that my opinions inclined toward those 
of the latter. 
“The geometrician Lacroix was a genuine specimen of the philoso- 
pher of the eighteenth century, a republican of the school of Con- 
dorcet, an enemy to the great and their hangers-on, uniting the 
gaiety of a child with the moroseness of a disappointed old man, — 
the ease, grace, and kindness of a warm-hearted gentleman with the 
gruffness of a grumbler. He was a thoroughly excellent man, but a 
stranger to the life of the world around him. The character of the 
misanthrope in Moliére, which I supposed purely imaginary, I found 
completely realized when I knew Lacroix.” 
