304 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
ing. I hastened to our usual rendezvous, and could not wait for 
the session to impart so important a discovery. I read my letter to 
the members present. Thénard was enthusiastic ; he ran about the 
room like a madman, erying out, ‘It is beautiful! it is admirable !’ 
Then turning to me, and laying hold of his arm: ‘ Look here,’ said 
he, ‘ I would give this arm to have made this discovery.’ Descotils, 
tranquilly buried in an arm-chair, said also, but in quite another 
tone: ‘It is very fine; but I would not give the end of my little 
finger to have made it.’” 
We pass over all De Candolle’s account of his life and do- 
mestic affairs during his residence at Paris, his particular in- 
vestigations, his excursions, in Switzerland and elsewhere, — 
even the memorable one in the Jura with Biot and Bonpland, 
in which he led the party into a position of imminent danger, 
causing Bonpland to bemoan his hard fate in having to perish 
on such a mole-hill as the Jura, after having safely climbed 
Chimborazo (p. 154) ; — his engagement and marriage (the 
latter in April, 1802), with Mademoiselle Torras, of a Gen- 
evan family resident in Paris; of the foundation of his her- 
barium by the fortunate acquisition of that of L’Heritier ; — 
of the first course of lectures which he gave, at the Collége 
de France, as a substitute for Cuvier, during the temporary 
absence of the latter, giving a course of vegetable physiology 
in place of one on general natural history ;— how he prepared 
to take the degree of M. D. in order to qualify himself as a 
candidate for the chair of medical natural history at the 
School of Medicine, then vacant; but how Richard, who dis- 
liked him because he was a pupil of Desfontaines, as De Can- 
dolle says, instigated Jussieu to offer himself for this chair, 
upon which, of course, De Candolle withdrew, but nevertheless 
wrote and sustained as a thesis for the doctorate, his Essay 
on the Medical Properties of Plants, compared with their ex- 
terior forms and their natural classification. He bore his 
examination creditably, received his diploma, and, the same 
evening, a private mock inauguration, which, considering the 
parties engaged in it, must have been irresistibly comical. 
“ Duméril invited to his house my family, my comrades of the 
‘Bulletin Philomathique,’ and even some of the Professors of the 
