308 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
he there prepared the first volume of this work; thus, with 
characteristic ardor and courage, but without calculating its 
immensity, entering upon the grand and most important un- 
dertaking of his life, and into that field of labor in systematic 
and descriptive botany for which he was eminently adapted, 
by his enterprising disposition and unflagging industry, his 
capacity for sustained labor, his excellent memory, his spirit 
of order and method, his quickness of eye, and his great apti- 
tude for generalization. 
The overthrow of the Empire, the Restoration, the Hun- 
dred Days, and the final fall of Napoleon supervened. De 
Candolle’s life at Montpellier was troubled and his prospects 
precarious. He naturally turned to his native Geneva, where 
he had kept up intimate social relations ; and when he had 
ascertained that a place would be provided for him, he ex- 
changed the comparatively ample emoluments of the chair at 
Montpellier for the very humble salary of one at Geneva, 
encumbered with the duty of lecturing upon zodlogy as well 
as botany. 
Pending the change he made a visit to England, in 1816, 
of which a detailed account is given, with reminiscences of the 
botanists and others whose personal acquaintance he then 
made. We regret that we have no room left for further ex- 
tracts: his account of Brown is expressive of the great re- 
spect he entertained for him, and that of Salisbury and of 
Lambert is amusing. 
Settled now at Geneva, at the good working age of thirty- 
eight, the narrative of his steadily industrious and prosperous 
life, and of his happy surroundings, flows on for nearly two 
hundred pages, down to the sad overthrow of his health by 
an overdose of iodine in 1836, his partial convalescence and 
resumption of botanical work in 1837, and ends with the ree- 
ord of the death of his only brother, at the beginning of the 
year 1841, only eight months before his own. 
These twenty-five years witnessed the publication of the 
two volumes of the “Systema”; the change of plan to a 
“Species Plantarum” in a restricted form, more nearly 
within the limits of a mortal’s life and powers; the publica- 
