MARCELIN BERTHELOT—MATIGNON. 671 
to their own membership. He was elected successively to the Royal 
Society of London, the Society of Physics of Geneva, the Society of 
Naturalists of Moscow, and the academies of St. Petersburg, Stock- 
holm, Dublin, Copenhagen, Munich, Turin, Amsterdam, Hungary, 
Boston, Lisbon, Vienna, Berlin, ete. 
Designated chevalier of the Legion of Honor August 13, 1861, he 
ran rapidly through the whole hierarchy until by the time of the 
fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of his scientific career the Goy- 
ernment of the Republic had decreed to him the highest reward it 
oives in decorating him with the Grand-Croix. 
The interest that Berthelot brought to bear on the reorganization 
of our method of education led him to the general inspection of 
higher educational affairs in 1876; to the permanent section of public 
instruction, of which he was vice-president; to the Ecole des Hautes 
tudes, of which he was president for the section of physical sciences. 
Head of the scientific committee for the defense of Paris in 1870, he 
was named member of the consultation committee on powders and 
saltpeters in 1876 and president of the commission on explosive sub- 
stances in 1878. Elected perpetual senator in 1881, he improved the 
opportunity by pleading on numerous occasions the cause of higher 
education and of scientific research. In 1886 he became minister of 
public instruction in the Goblet cabinet and was called later by M. 
Léon Bourgeois to the quai d’Orsay. 
Berthelot succeeded Joseph Bertrand in the Académie Francaise, 
and was received there by Lemaitre. 
T do not pretend in the few pages at my disposal to estimate as it 
deserves the work of this teacher; I shall content myself with sketch- 
ing merely its principal features. 
Berthelot not only transformed and broadened the domain of 
chemistry, but at the same time he caused this science to progress by 
the side of the exact sciences. 
Before Berthelot most chemists considered the substances which 
form in living organisms as impossible of reproduction in the 
laboratory from their constituent elements—carbon, oxygen, hydro- 
gen, and nitrogen—by the sole play of chemical affinities. “ In organic 
nature,” wrote Berzelius in 1849, “elements appear to obey laws 
entirely different from the laws of inorganic nature.” A mysterious 
force, the vital force, is judged indispensable to their elaboration. 
The chemist can only destroy them, separate them with the aid of 
appropriate reagents, and take from them certain new substances, 
isolated stones in the complex edifice. His rdéle is therefore extremely 
limited, since in the field of organic compounds he has at his dis- 
posal, as objects of study, only the immediate principles elaborated 
by animals and vegetable growths. Berthelot took up the separated 
products and tried step by step to put them together again to con- 
