218 Notice of Prof. De Candolle. 
plest manner, indulgence for the youth of its author, at the same 
time admitting that every book must plead its own cause, and 
promising to endeavor to make up in zeal for the deficiencies of 
his experience and knowledge. There certainly could have been 
no affectation in this modesty, for it shows itself just as clearly 
in every future work ; and that zeal must have been no less real 
which held ont to the last years of his laborious life. 
'I'wo years after, in April, 1800, he laid before the National In- 
stitute, in manuscript, his Astragologia.* This was committed to 
Lamarck and Desfontaines, at that time two of the most distin- 
guished botanists of France, and who ever after seem to have 
been his firm and honored friends. They reported very favora- 
bly upon the work, observing particularly upon the extent of his 
researches, and the exactness and precision of his descriptions. 
From this time he began to be well known, and from this, too, 
probably, dates his connection with Lamarck, with whom he was 
afterwards associated in editing the Flore Frangaise. His connec- 
tion with Lamarck and with the Flore Frangaise, was of momen- 
tous consequences to him. It was the first edition of this work, 
as he himself declares, which, by initiating him in his youth into 
the elements of botany, decided his taste and his fate for life... 
It must have been about this period that he spent six years in 
traversing all the provinces of France.{ In every one he herbo- 
tized; every where he studied the vegetation, and every where 
made, or obtained from public or private collections, specimens 
and documents. 
In 1804, be published in oneiic his Essay upon the Medical 
Properties of Plants, It was his inaugural thesis on taking the 
degree of doctor in medicine in the Faculty of Paris. 
In the same year he delivered his first course of lectures 0” 
— the substance of which he introduced in the ‘‘ Princi- 
mo possi to make dried specimens. echt is accompanied by a beautiful colored 
i gure by ;Redouté. If it were intended, as it see ms to be, to give a pretty fal 
sa gape’ until the publication of the latter work. 
was shed in Paris in 1802, in one volume falio, by Garnery, 
the press « ‘Tt Sites descriptions of a great number of species, 
many of them F ahigahd and t on allied, often gum-bearing Leguminose. 
It is illustrated ath eae plates by Redo! 
t Preface to the sixth volume of Flore Francie, p. 10. 
$ Flore Frangaise, vi, preface, p. 7. 
