Philosophical Character ofDecandolle. 199 



his style, and the absence at once of those affectations, and 

 those involved periods, which too often disgust or embarrass 

 us in the writings of other men of science. 



Those who have perused the works of the late Sir John 

 Leslie, or of the still more celebrated John Hunter, not to al- 

 lude to men of less name and distinction, will be sensible, by 

 the aid of contrast, how much the reception of scientific 

 truths is promoted by the power which Monsieur Decandolle 

 had acquii-ed, from an early familiarity with the purest models 

 of style, no less perhaps than from his own natural clearness 

 of conception, of presenting before us, without study or pre- 

 meditation, that copious flow of ideas with which his mind 

 was fraught on all subjects connected with his favourite 

 science, in language so perfectly precise, and in an order so 

 completely methodical. 



At length, after he had in some measure satiated himself 

 with the sweets of elegant literature, a love for botany ap- 

 pears to have been awakened in his mind by an attendance 

 on the lectures of Professor Vaucher* of Geneva, who lived 

 long enough to have the satisfaction, at a later period, of see- 

 ing his former pupil in undisputed possession of the fore- 

 most rank amongst European naturalists. 



At the age of 18, in the year 1796, he went to Paris,t where 

 a taste for physical science, which had been suspended for a 

 while by the atrocities and by the vandalism of the Revolu- 

 tion, began to revive. 



Here he attended the lectures of Vauquelin, Cuvier, Four- 

 croy, and others, and contracted a friendship with Desfon- 

 taines and Lamarck. 



The former had, in 1787, established that important gene- 



* Flourens, in his Elogc of Decandolle, which has reached me since the 

 present memoir was drawn up, attributes the awakening of a taste for bo- 

 tany in the mind of Decandolle to another circumstance, namely, to his 

 taking refuge, when a boy, with his mother and brother, whilst the French 

 were besieging Geneva in 1792, in a village situated at the foot of the Jura, 

 where he amused himself in collecting wild plants. The statement given 

 in the text was taken from the sketch of Decandolle's life given in the Fe- 

 deral newspaper by a distinguished fellow-citizen of Geneva; and it seems 

 probable that both causes may have contributed to give him this early bias. 



t At the suggestion of Dolomicu, according to Flourens. 



