138 KAMBLES OF A NATURALIST. 



dawn, provided with a piece of bread, which was to 

 serve for his meal through the day. Exclusively 

 absorbed in the studies which were to render his 

 name illustrious, he was contented and happy if he 

 could return at night with some fossil, some mollusc, 

 or some alga, which he had gathered from the rocks 

 on the shore, or in his wanderings along the sandy 

 beach. M. Brongniart belonged to a generation 

 which is daily passing away. All his life he had 

 loved science for her own sake, and revered her 

 under every form and every manifestation ; he loved 

 her too personified in those young and ardent 

 students of nature who, like himself, had been 

 zealously devoted to her cause, and he ever treated 

 them not as rivals who were to be feared and 

 shunned, but as successors who merited instruction 

 and assistance. 



A week after my interview with M. Brongniart, I 

 was at Bayonne. In every other place I had always 

 found a sort of separation between the water and 

 the rest of the landscape, but here the country and 

 the sea seemed to approach and blend with one 

 another. Near its source the Adour, which is 

 scarcely wider than the Seine at the Pont des Arts, 

 winds along the foot of lofty hills. Near its mouth 

 dunes covered here and there with pines *, appear 



palaeontology. Thus both departments of that new science of 

 palaeontology, which teaches us to read the history of the globe in 

 its fossil remains, with as much certainty as we read the history of 

 man on the monuments of the past, is of a wholly French origin. 



* The kind of pine which grows near Bayonne is the Pinus mari- 

 tima. This tree, whose trunk is often twisted, and whose wood is 

 too soft to be of any great value, has nevertheless become a source 



