THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN FRANCE. 



155 



41. 

 Deserved 



Cuvier. 



selves to the risk of taking a backward step ; all their 

 propositions are established with certainty, and become 

 so many solid foundations for that which remains to be 

 built." ^ 



Nor can we look upon the great prominence which 

 Cuvier gives to French names in the course of his survey prominence 



" J given to 



as unjust or partial. He was well aware of the contribu- name's by 

 tions of other nations : no one has spoken in more gen- 

 erous and correct terms of Priestley and Cavendish, of 

 Banks and Eumford, of Pallas, Werner, and Humboldt. 

 We must admit the correctness of the remark, " that 

 even in those departments where chance has willed that 

 Frenchmen should not make the principal discoveries, 

 the manner in which they have received, examined, and 

 developed them, and followed them out into all their 

 consequences, places their names next to those of the 

 real inventors, and gives them in many ways the right 

 to share in the honour." ^ 



In the first decades of this century the home of the 

 scientific spirit was France : for though not born there, 

 it was nevertheless there nursed into full growth and 



vigour. 



But it soon set out on its wanderings throucrh 



o o 



^ Compare also the " Reflexions 

 sur la marche actuelle des Sci- 

 ences,',' being the introduction to 

 the ' Eloges historiques,' vol. i. p. 

 1, &c. 



- ' Rapport,' p. 391. It is also 

 remarkable how clearly Cuvier here 

 announces the defects which the 

 teaching of science was still labour- 

 ing under. Whilst he rightly 

 praises the great Paris institutions, 

 the medical schools, the mathe- 

 matical, physical, and polytechnic 

 establishments, the new schools of 



technology and agriculture, as un- 

 equalled organisations for higher 

 instruction, he draws attention to 

 the absence of equally efficient ele- 

 mentary schools and to the neglect 

 of those provincial institutions 

 which before that age had already 

 done so much to disseminate know- 

 ledge and learning. At the end of 

 our century both France and Great 

 Britain have still only very partially 

 supplied the wants which Cuvier so 

 clearly defines in the beginning. 



