136 K AMBLES OF A NATURAL I ST. 



gniart * laid before me his diaries and the journals in 

 which he had day by day recorded the varied events 

 of his life. For two hours we perused together 

 these memorials of the past, and often the voice of 



* For more than a century the family of Brongniart has enjoyed 

 the rare privilege of finding that the members of each new genera- 

 tion enhanced by their own eminent merit the splendour of the 

 name which they bore. 



Alexandre Theodore Brongniart, a member of the Institute, 

 whose fame first rendered this family illustrious, was born in Paris 

 in 1739, and died in the same city in 1815. Having been originally 

 destined for the medical profession, he first directed his attention to 

 scientific pursuits, but yielding soon to his taste for the fine arts, he 

 devoted himself entirely to the study of architecture. We owe to 

 him the erection of some of those princely mansions which are 

 daily being replaced by the humbler houses of the bourgeois, and 

 some of those parks which even more fully manifest the style of 

 living in former times. M. Brongniart was engaged throughout 

 the whole of his life in different public offices ; he also erected many 

 public edifices, among others the Bourse, the exterior of which was 

 partly constructed in accordance with his plans, but on his death 

 the completion of the work was entrusted to an architect who made 

 very great alterations in the original designs. 



Alexandre Brongniart, a member of the Institute, and professor 

 at the Jardin des Plantes, was the son of Alexandre Theodore 

 Brongniart. He was born in Paris in 1770, and died in the same 

 city in 1847. From, an early period he devoted himself to science, 

 and at the age of twenty he published a work on the means of 

 improving the art of enamelling. While he was attached to the 

 Army of the Pyrenees, in the capacity of a military pharmacien, he 

 devoted his attention specially to zoology, and commenced a memoir 

 on the anatomy of Cephalopodous Molluscs, which, however, he 

 abandoned as soon as he learned that Cuvier was engaged on the 

 same subject. He next studied mineralogy, and published in this 

 department of science a Traite elementaire, which was adopted by 

 the University, and was used in the mineralogical class at the 

 Jardin des Plantes. 



Brongniart having combined the study of living and fossil animals, 



