r Personal Traits of Giiettard 45 



perpetual Secretary, " You are going to tell a lot of lies. 

 When it comes to my turn I want only the truth told 

 about me." Condorcet, in sketching the defects as well as 

 the excellences of his friend's character, remarks that in 

 fulfilling his wishes in the strictest sense, he is rendering 

 to Guettard the homage that he himself would most have 

 desired. So little did he try to seem better than he was 

 that his defects might be most prominent to those who 

 only casually met him, while his sterling qualities were 

 known only to his friends. " Those who knew Guettard 

 merely by some brusque answer or other indication of bad 

 temper," his biographer remarks, " would be surprised to 

 learn that this man, so severe in appearance, so hard to 

 please, forced by the circumstances of his position to live 

 alone, had actually adopted the large family of a woman 

 who had been his servant, brought up the children and 

 watched over the smallest details of their education ; that 

 he could never see any one in distress without not only 

 coming to his help, but even weeping with him. He bore 

 the same sensibility towards animals also, and expressly 

 forbade that any living creature should be killed for him 

 or at his house. He was a man who, losing control of his 

 words when in bad humour, had quarrelled more than once 

 with each of his friends, yet had always ended by loving 

 them and being loved more than ever by them ; who had 

 hurt most of his associates in his disputes with them, but 

 yet had preserved the friendship of several of them, and 

 had never diminished in any one of them the esteem which 

 it was impossible to refuse to his character and his virtues." 1 

 Guettard's position in the history of science is that of 



1 Condorcet's tilogc, pp. 238, 240. 



