Antoine-Laurent Jussieu. 3 



Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, the nephew and successor of 

 Bernard, was born at Lyons on the 12th of April 1748. As 

 soon as his elementary studies in that city were terminated, 

 his uncle invited him to Paris, where he arrived in July 1765, 

 in his eighteenth yeai-. He was thus at once put under the 

 protection of the man who, since the demise of Toiu^nefort, 

 swayed the sceptre of botany in France, and whose only rival 

 in Europe was Linnaeus ; he was a wonderful man, whose name 

 is a household word throughout the scientific world, and who, 

 notwithstanding, has scarcely written any thing. But if this 

 eminent individual wrote little, he thought much ; and spent 

 his life in meditating upon one of those questions which com- 

 prehend almost every other in a science ; he resolved the 

 problem of arrangement in natural history, and solved this 

 fundamental problem in the middle of an age, whose efforts 

 of every description have prodigiously advanced the domains 

 of human intelligence. 



At the time that the young Jussieu came to reside with 

 Bernard in Paris, his uncle Antoine was dead, his uncle Joseph 

 was still in Peru, and his illustrious aged relative lived ahnost 

 alone. Residing in a small house in the rue des Bernardins, 

 he went out only to mass, to the academy, and to the Jardin 

 des Plantes ; he was almost always engaged in deep meditar 

 tions, and allowed them to be interrupted only—if interrup- 

 tion it might be called — by intercom"se with a few friends, se- 

 lected from the choice men of the day, such as Poivre, Lemon- 

 nier, Duhamel, Malesherbes, &c. Such was the retu-ed life 

 of Bernard ; and to this simplicity of manners, and a taste 

 for free and continued meditation, in which, by a peculiar 

 trait of his character, he seemed rather to allow ideas to sug- 

 gest themselves than to search for them, he conjoined a most 

 remarkable regularity in his habits. Every thing in his man- 

 sion was subjected to the most exact regidarity and order, to 

 what might be designated the very essence of arrangement. 

 Every thing was done every day, at the same moment, and in 

 the same way. Every meal was at a fixed and invariable 

 hour ; the supper hour was nine, and when Laiirent went to 

 the theatre, he never forgot to calculate the precise number 

 of minutes which it would take to hurry back to the parlour, 



