PROFESSOR OF INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY aR 
crystallography, had been, the year previous, rescued 
from prison by young Geoffroy St. Hilaire, his neck 
being barely saved from the gleaming axe. Roland, 
the friend of science and letters, had been so hunted 
down that at Rouen, in a moment of despair, on hear- 
ing of his wife’s death, he thrust his sword-cane 
through his heart. Madame Roland had been be- 
headed, as also a cousin of her husband, and we can 
well imagine that these fateful summer and autumn 
days were scarcely favorable to scientific enterprises.* 
Still, however, amid the loud alarums of this social 
tempest, the Museum underwent a new birth which 
proved not to be untimely. The Minister of the In- 
terior (Garat) invited the professors of the Museum 
to constitute an assembly to nominate a director and 
a treasurer, and he begged them to present extracts 
of their deliberations for him to send to the execu- 
tive council, ‘“‘under the supervision of which the 
* Most men of science of the Revolution, like Monge and others, 
were advanced republicans, and the Chevalier Lamarck, though of 
noble birth, was perhaps not without sympathy with the ideas which 
led to the establishment of the republic. It is possible that in his 
walks and intercourse with Rousseau he may have been inspired with 
the new notions of liberty and equality first promulgated by that 
philosopher. 
His studies and meditations were probably not interrupted by the 
events of the Terror. Stevens, in his history of the French Revolu- 
tion, tells us that Paris was never gayer than in the summer of 1793, 
and that during the Reign of Terror the restaurants, cafés, and the- 
atres were always full. There were never more theatres open at the 
same period than then, though no single great play or opera was 
produced. Meanwhile the great painter David at this time built up 
a school of art and made that city a centre for art students. Indeed 
the Revolution was ‘‘a grand time for enthusiastic young men,” while 
people in general lived their ordinary lives. There is little doubt, 
then, that the savants, except the few who were occupied by their 
duties as members of the Convertion Nationale, worked away quietly 
at their specialties, each in his own study or laboratory or lecture- 
room, 
