112 AUGUSTIN-PYRAMUS DE CANDOLLE. 
To De Candolle’s credit it must be said, not only that his career was 
remarkably free from controversies about priority and reclamations, but 
that his example and precepts, his scrupulous care to render due credit 
te every contributor, his respect for unpublished names communicated 
to his own or recorded in other herbaria, and the like, have been most 
influential in establishing both the law and the ethics which prevail in 
systematic botany (more fully or from an earlier period than in the 
other departments of natural history), and which have secured such 
general co-operation and harmonious relations among its votaries. 
In these early days, De Candolle was a good deal occupied with 
vegetable physiology ;—the results are contained in his papers “ on the 
pores in the bark of leaves,” i.e, stomata; on the vegetation of the 
mistletoe; and on his experiments relative to the influence of light on 
certain plants, mainly those which exhibit strikingly the change in the 
position of their leaves at night, which has been called the sleep of 
plants, The account of these experiments, in which he caused certain 
plants to acknowledge an artificial night and day, when read before the 
Institute, gave him considerable éc/a ; and probably also the compli- 
ment of being named one of the three candidates to fill the vacancy in 
the Academy of Sciences left by the death of L' Héritier ;—a mere com- 
pliment, for the contest, of course, was between Labillardióre and 
Beauvois. In the canvass, De Candolle called upon Adanson, then very 
aged, and in his dotage more eccentric than ever. 
If not chosen into the Institute, which indeed he could not pretend 
to expect, De Candolle was in that year made a member of that active 
association,—‘‘ la pépinitre de l'Académie des Sciences,”—the Société 
Philomathique, and was soon placed on the committee in charge of its 
“Bulletin.” This brought him into intimate connection with such 
colleagues as Brongniart (Alex.), Duméril, Cuvier, Biot, Lacroix, and 
Sylvestre. 
“ We met, at each other's lodgings, on Saturday evenings, after the session 
of the Society, to read and to discuss the morceaux intended for the Bulletin, 
making the Bulletin, but we kept up our Saturday evening réunions. It was 
i consequence of this that Cuvier continued long afterwards his Saturday 
evening receptions; but I return to the year 1800.” 
By De Candolle’s account, he was by about ten years the youngest 
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