28 GRAHAM LITSK 



We end this memoir with a consoling reflection. To merit well of humanity 

 and to pay tribute to one's country it is not necessary to take part in brilliant 

 public functions that have to do with the organization and regeneration of em- 

 pires. The naturalist may also perform patriotic functions in the silence of his 

 laboratory and at his desk; he can hope through his labors to diminish the mass 

 of ills which afflict the human race or to increase its happiness and pleasure; and 

 should he by some new methods which he has opened up prolong the average life 

 of men by years or even by days he can also aspire to the glorious title of bene- 

 factor of humanity. 



These are words written by the greatest scientist of his day under the 

 spell of the French Revolution. They are words of an educated, culti- 

 vated man of middle age spoken in the Academic des Sciences in the 

 year of the fall of the Bastile and at a time when Edmund Burke from 

 the other side of the Channel said. ''In the groves of their Academy at 

 the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows." 



Lavoisier and Franklin had been intimate friends, living near each 

 other in Paris and Franklin dining frequently with the great French 

 chemist and hi* wife. In a letter written to Franklin, then in America, on 

 February 5, 1700, during the early clays of the French Revolution, 

 Lavoisier says: "After having recited what has transpired in chemistry 

 it is well to speak of our political revolution. We regard it as accom- 

 plished, well accomplished and beyond recall. There still exists, however, 

 an aristocratic party which is making vain efforts but is evidently 

 feeble. . . . We greatly regret at this moment your absence from France. 

 You could be our guide and mark the limits beyond which we ought not 

 to pass." . 



And in 1790 Lavoisier (g} concluded his last scientific communication 

 to the Academic with these words, 4 *Up to the present time we have learned 

 only to conjecture as to the cause of a great number of diseases and as to 

 the means of their cure. Before hazarding a theory we propose to multiply 

 our observations, to investigate the phenomena of digestion arid to analyze 

 the blood both in health and in disease. We will draw upon medical 

 records and the light and experience of learned physicians who are our 

 contemporaries and it will be only when we are thus completely armed 

 that we will dare to attack a revered and antique colossus of prejudice 

 and of error." 



No person of understanding can escape a thrill at this vision of modern 

 medicine expressed by him who had overthrown phlogiston, discovered the 

 composition of the air and it* relation to combustion and to life, who 

 had created calorimetry and revolutionized the whole of chemical thought. 



True to his enthusiasm we find him drawing up the conditions for an 

 international prize of 5,000 livres offered by the Academic des Sciences 

 in 1702 to the author of the best experimental treatise on the liver and 

 the bile (t) . 



Lavoisier's life outside his laboratory had been that of a public 



