AUGUSTIN-PYRAMUS DE CANDOLLE. 307 
colleagues, by the official personages, and by the protestant 
society of the city, — in those days there was little social in- 
tercourse between catholics and protestants in the south of 
France, — and he gave himself with ardor and success to his 
new duties. He renovated the botanic garden, — the oldest 
in France, founded by Henry IV.,—and secured additional 
funds for its support. He built up the botanical school, and 
developed peculiar talents as an instructor, — with results 
perhaps up to the average as respects the making of bota- 
nists; but Dunal, one of his earliest pupils, was about the 
only one at Montpellier who achieved a general reputation, 
and his fell much below expectations. He continued and ex- 
tended his official botanical explorations of the provinces of 
France, making annual reports to the Minister of the Interior, 
and planning a very comprehensive work on the “ Statique 
Végétale de la France,” which, however, owing to political 
and other changes, was never written. He wrote and pub- 
lished the “ Théorie Elémentaire ” which made his reputation 
as a theoretical botanist, and well exemplifies the characteris- 
tics of his genius in this regard, —constructive rather than 
critical, — quick and ingenious in seizing analogies and in 
framing hypotheses, rather than sagacious in testing their 
validity,— content with an hypothesis which neatly connects 
observed facts, but not so solicitous to prove it actually true, 
nor urgent to follow it out to ultimate conclusions, — a lucid 
expositor, and a happy diviner within a certain reach, rather 
than a profound investigator, — in short, a generalizer rather 
than an analyzer. 
At Montpellier, also, De Candolle planned his “Systema 
Vegetabilium” —a systematic and detailed account of all 
known plants, arranged under their natural families, — and 
1 Tt is curious that De Candolle, who early took to the ideas of Geof- 
froy in anatomy who founded his morphology of the flower upon the idea 
of symmetry, and recognized the homology of the floral organs with 
leaves, and who could have got from the writings of his townsman, Bon- 
net, enough of phyllotaxy for the purpose, seems never to have thought 
of connecting the one with the other, nor to have asked himself why a 
flower is symmetrical. 
