118 AUGUSTIN-PYRAMUS DE CANDOLLE. 
election as ons of the eight foreign associates of the Academy of 
Sciences. 
At Montpellier De Candolle was heartily weleomed by his colleagues, 
by the official personages, and by the Protestant society of the city—in 
those days there was little social intercourse between Catholics and 
Protestants in the south of France; and he gave himself with ardour 
and success to his new duties. He renovated the Botanic Garden— 
the oldest in France, founded by Henry [V.—and secured additional 
funds for its support. He built up the botanical school, and developed 
peculiar talents as an instructor, with results perhaps up to the average 
as respects the making of botanists; but Dunal, one of his earliest 
pupils, was about the only one at Montpellier who achieved a general 
reputation, and he fell much below expectations. He continued and 
extended his official botanical explorations of the provinces of France, 
making annual reports to the Minister of the Interior, and planning a 
very comprehensive work on the ‘Statique Végétale de la France,’ 
which, however, owing to political and other changes, was never written. 
He wrote and published the ‘ Théorie Elémentaire,’ which made his re- 
putation as a theoretical botanist, and well exemplifies the characteris- 
tics of his genius in this regard,—constructive, rather than critical,— 
quick and ingenious in seizing analogies and in framing hypotheses, 
rather than sagacious in testing their validity,—content with an hypo- 
thesis which neatly connects observed facts, but not so solicitous to 
prove it actually true, nor urgent to follow it out to ultimate conclu- 
sions,—a lucid expositor, and a happy diviner within a certain reach, 
rather than a profound investigator,—in short, a generalizer rather than 
an analyser. 
At Montpellier, also, De Candolle planned his * Systema Vegetabi- 
lium,’ a systematic and detailed account of all known plants, arranged 
under their natural families ; and he there prepared the first volume of 
this work—thus, with aisida ardour and courage, but without 
calculating its immensity, entering upon the grand and most important 
undertaking of his life, and into that field of labour in systematic and 
descriptive botany for which he was eminently adapted, by his enter- 
prising disposition and unflagging industry, his capacity for sustained 
labour, his excellent memory, his spirit of order and method, his quick- 
ness of eye, and his great aptitude for generalization 
The overthrow of the Empire, the Restoration, the Hundred Days, 
