CHAPTER I 



THE BUPRESTIS-HUNTING CERCERIS 



' I A HERE are for each one of us, according 

 to his turn of mind, certain books that 

 open up horizons hitherto undreamed of and 

 mark an epoch in our mental life. They 

 fling wide the gates of a new world wherein 

 our intellectual powers are henceforth to be 

 employed ; they are the spark which lights the 

 fuel on a hearth doomed, without its aid, to 

 remain indefinitely bleak and cold. And it 

 is often chance that places in our hands those 

 books which mark the beginning of a new 

 era in the evolution of our ideas. The most 

 casual circumstances, a few lines that happen 

 somehow to come before our eyes decide our 

 future and plant us in the appointed groove. 

 One winter evening, when the rest of the 

 household was asleep, as I sat reading beside 

 a stove whose ashes were still warm, my book 

 made me forget for a while the cares of the 

 morrow: those heavy cares of a poor profes- 

 sor of physics who, after piling up diplomas 

 and for a quarter of a century performing 



