304 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



ing. I hastened to our usual rendezvous, and could not wait for 

 the session to impart so important a discovery. I read my letter to 

 the members present. Thenard was enthusiastic ; he ran about the 

 room like a madman, crying out, ' It is beautiful ! it is admirable ! ' 

 Then turning to me, and laying hold of his arm : ' Look here,' said 

 he, ' I would give this arm to have made this discovery.' Descotils, 

 tranquilly buried in an arm-chair, said also, but in quite another 

 tone : ' It is very fine ; but I would not give the end of my little 

 finger to have made it.' " 



We pass over all De Candolle's account of his life and do- 

 mestic affairs during his residence at Paris, his particular in- 

 vestigations, his excursions, in Switzerland and elsewhere, — 

 even the memorable one in the Jura with Biot and Bonpland, 

 in which he led the party into a position of imminent danger, 

 causing Bonpland to bemoan his hard fate in having to perish 

 on such a mole-hill as the Jura, after having safely climbed 

 Chimborazo (p. 154) ; — his engagement and marriage (the 

 latter in April, 1802), with Mademoiselle Torras, of a Gen- 

 evan family resident in Paris ; of the foundation of his her- 

 barium by the fortunate acquisition of that of L'Heritier ; — 

 of the first course of lectures which he gave, at the College 

 de France, as a substitute for Cuvier, during the temporary 

 absence of the latter, giving a course of vegetable physiology 

 in place of one on general natural history ; — how he prepared 

 to take the degree of M. D. in order to qualify himself as a 

 candidate for the chair of medical natural history at the 

 School of Medicine, then vacant ; but how Richard, who dis- 

 liked him because he was a pupil of Desfontaines, as De Can- 

 dolle says, instigated Jussieu to offer himself for this chair, 

 upon which, of course, De Candolle withdrew, but nevertheless 

 wrote and sustained as a thesis for the doctorate, his Essay 

 on the Medical Properties of Plants, compared with their ex- 

 terior forms and their natural classification. He bore his 

 examination creditably, received his diploma, and, the same 

 evening, a private mock inauguration, which, considering the 

 parties engaged in it, must have been irresistibly comical. 



" Dumeril invited to his house my family, my comrades of the 

 ' Bulletin Philomathique,' and even some of the Professors of the 



