BARON CUVIER. 109 



fore give M. Cuvier's observations, taken from the same 

 eloge : — '• Perhaps 1 may be blamed for recalling these sad 

 recollections ; but where a celebrated man has been so un- 

 fortunate as to be accused, as M. Fourcroy was, — where 

 this accusation occasioned the torment of his life, — the his- 

 torian would in vain strive to bury it in oblivion, by being 

 himself silent. We ought now to say, that if, in the strict 

 researches we have made, we had found the slightest proof 

 of so horrible an atrocity, no human power could have 

 forced us to sully our Hps by his eloge, to make the roofs of 

 this temple resound with our praises, — this temple, which 

 ought to be no less the asylum of honour than of genius.^' 



To Dessesserts, the physician, and subject of the next 

 eloge, the French owe the banishment of those horrible 

 machines of whalebone, those swathing clothes, those hot- 

 houses, where the minds and bodies of infants were impri- 

 soned from their birth. By M. Dessesserts were those 

 mothers recalled to their duty, who abandoned the nourish- 

 ment of their offspring to others, when capable of affording 

 it themselves ; and, though unacknowledged, to M. Des- 

 sesserts was Rousseau indebted for the first pages of his 

 Emile. 



The next subject of biographical notice is Henry Caven- 

 dish, that remarkable Englishman, who, notwithstanding 

 his splendid fortune and his noble birth, pursued science with 

 the most disinterested ardour. How M. Cuvier appreciated 

 his labours, will be gathered from the following passage: — 

 ••AH that science revealed to him, seemed to be tinctured 

 with the sublime and the marvellous : he weighed the 

 earth, he prepared the means of navigating through the air, 

 he deprived water of its elementary quality ; and these doc- 

 trines, so new, and so opposed to received opinions, were 

 demonstrated by him in a manner still more extraordinary 

 than the discovery itself. The writings where he lays them 

 before others, are so many cliefs-d'oeuvre of wisdom and 

 method ; perfect in their whole, and perfect in their details, 

 in which no other hand has found any thing to reform, and 

 the splendour of which has only increased w^th time 



and all power of being useful to others was taken from him. Lavoisier 

 fell a victim to the revolutionary monsters, and M. Fourcroy was accused 

 of taking a part in that which freed him from a powerful rival. 



K 



