AUGUSTIN-PYRAMUS DE CANDOLLE. 307 



colleagues, by the official personages, and by the protestant 

 society of the city, — in those clays there was little social in- 

 tercourse between catholics and protestants in the south of 

 France, — and he gave himself with ardor and success to his 

 new duties. He renovated the botanic garden, — the oldest 

 in France, founded by Henry IV., — and secured additional 

 funds for its support. He built up the botanical school, and 

 developed peculiar talents as an instructor, — with results 

 perhaps up to the average as respects the making of bota- 

 nists ; but Dunal, one of his earliest pupils, was about the 

 only one at Montpellier who achieved a general reputation, 

 and his fell much below expectations. He continued and ex- 

 tended his official botanical explorations of the provinces of 

 France, making annual reports to the Minister of the Interior, 

 and planning a very comprehensive work on the " Statique 

 Vegetale de la France," which, however, owing to political 

 and other changes, was never written. He wrote and pub- 

 lished the " Theorie Elementaire " which made his reputation 

 as a theoretical botanist, and well exemplifies the characteris- 

 tics of his genius in this regard, — constructive rather than 

 critical, — quick and ingenious in seizing analogies and in 

 framing hypotheses, rather than sagacious in testing their 

 validity, — content with an hypothesis which neatly connects 

 observed facts, but not so solicitous to prove it actually true, 

 nor urgent to follow it out to ultimate conclusions, — a lucid 

 expositor, and a happy diviner within a certain reach, rather 

 than a profound investigator, — in short, a generalizer rather 

 than an analyzer. 1 



At Montpellier, also, De Candolle planned his " Systema 

 Vegetabilium " — a systematic and detailed account of all 

 known plants, arranged under their natural families, — and 



1 It is curious that De Candolle, who early took to the ideas of Geof- 

 froy in anatomy who founded his morphology of the flower upon the idea 

 of symmetry, and recognized the homology of the floral organs with 

 leaves, and who could have got from the writings of his townsman, Bon- 

 net, enough of phyllotaxy for the purpose, seems never to have thought 

 of connecting the one with the other, nor to have asked himself why a 

 flower is symmetrical. 



