THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN FRANCE. 155 



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." l 



Xor can we look upon the great prominence which . 



f~, -,., . . Deserved 



Cuvier gives to irench names in the course or his survey prominen 



J given to 



as unjust or partial. He was well aware of the contribu- ^m e c s h b 

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

 erous and correct terms of Priestley and Cavendish, of 

 Banks and Rumford, 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." 2 



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 through 



1 Compare also the "Reflexions j technology and agriculture, as un- 



sur la marche actuelle des Sci- equalled organisations for higher 



ences," being the introduction to instruction, he draws attention to 



the ' Eloges historiques,' vol. i. p. the absence of equally efficient ele- 



1, &c. mentary schools and to the neglect 



- 'Rapport,' p. 391. It is also of those provincial institutions 



remarkable how clearly Cuvier here which before that age had already 



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 



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. 



