298 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



everything, made him skillful in every function ; he brought to it 

 method, order, facility for administration, a knowledge of details 

 and of the whole, a sincere love of justice, and a disinterestedness 

 which caused him to be noticed and admired. 



" Cuvier might justly be compared to Haller, whom he resembled 

 as much as the difference of nation and time would allow. Both 

 astonished by their extraordinary capacity for learning, knowing 

 equally well natural and historical science, greedy of positive facts 

 on all subjects, endowed with wonderful memory and a remarkable 

 spirit of order, capable of great labor, and yet gifted with much fa- 

 cility. But at the side of these admirable qualities it might be 

 observed that neither had an inventive genius ; they observed facts 

 well, but never thought to unite them by a theory that would divine 

 or discover others. Their characters corresponded even outside of 

 science : both loved power, and sacrificed precious time to the desire 

 of political advancement ; both loved reading to a passion, even at 

 the hours destined ordinarily for meals and domestic intercourse ; 

 both were cold and haughty in conversation with those who inspired 

 them with no interest, piquant and profound to those whom they 

 thought worthy of it ; finally both had a certain contempt for that 

 class of ideas called liberal, and held to the aristocratic party. The 

 great size of their heads gave them a certain physical resemblance. 

 In one word, it would be difficult to find two celebrated men more 

 exactly alike, and the lovers of metempsychosis might say, if the 

 epochs would permit, that the soul of Haller had passed without 

 change into the body of Cuvier. 



" To me personally, Cuvier was wellnigh perfection. . . . Not- 

 withstanding the great difference in our respective views of life and 

 of politics, and even of science in some theoretical matters, our in- 

 timacy was never clouded, nor was it disturbed by his quarrel with 

 Geoffrey, although he knew that my opinions inclined toward those 

 of the latter. 



" The geometrician Lacroix was a genuine specimen of the philoso- 

 pher of the eighteenth century, a republican of the school of Con- 

 dorcet, an enemy to the great and their hangers-on, uniting the 

 gaiety of a child with the moroseness of a disappointed old man, — 

 the ease, grace, and kindness of a warm-hearted gentleman with the 

 gruffness of a grumbler. He was a thoroughly excellent man, but a 

 stranger to the life of the world around him. The character of the 

 misanthrope in Moliere, which I supposed purely imaginary, I found 

 completely realized when I knew Lacroix." 



