Miscellanies. 377 



honor and welfare of our country is drawing to its consummation. It 

 is upon our youthful colleagues, among whom I delight to hehold so 

 many promising hopes, that this care must devolve. They, even in 

 their adolescence, must prepare to act their parts with honor to them- 

 selves. May the youth who hear me never remain satisfied with a 

 barren admiration of those who have gone before them, but may 

 those who feel within them some sparks of the sacred fire labor faith- 

 fully to restore it to us. May they remember that the literary and 

 scientific lustre of Geneva has been one of the principal points in 

 the interests of Europe, and consequently of our independence. 



Young men, you have enjoyed in the improved state of our in- 

 stitutions, immense facilities for your education. May they be fruit- 

 ful in your hands! your predecessors have had but one sad advantage 

 over you, that of having labored in times of trouble, which com- 

 pelled them, perhaps, to draw upon themselves for all that their 

 strength was able to afford them. Fatal advantage which 1 am far 

 from wishing you to enjoy, and the return of which must be depre- 

 cated by every friend of his country. But suffer not yourselves to 

 be enervated by your happy condition ; learn to preserve the activi- 

 ty of your minds, in the midst of a life, as 1 hope, exempt from 

 storms; learn to pursue a course conformable to your talents and 

 to pursue it with energy. Learn to resist the seductions with which 

 our public and domestic habits fritter into rags the time of the most 

 active ; learn that there can be no possible success without great la- 

 bor and a most willing patience ; learn to withdraw from the seduc- 

 tive allurements of a life of pleasure, visit foreign countries, not 

 passing through them in a hasty manner, but by studying their civil 

 polity, bring back to us every thing that is really useful ; bring back 

 also heai'ts more truly Genevese, by a more enlightened sense of the 

 liberty and happiness we enjoy. Do your best to preserve to us now 

 and forever, that sage liberty, the friend of order, of justice, and 

 of peace, which we now enjoy, and without which all improvements 

 become hazardous and problematical. Young people, the country 

 has its eyes upon you and you will not disappoint its expectations. — 

 Bib. Univ. Mai, 1832. 



CHEMISTRY. 



1. Combinations of carburetied hydrogen. — Note by M. Dumas. 

 — I published, some years since, a work on Ethers conjointly with M. 

 Boullay, the principal object of which was to show that bi-carbonated 



Vol. XXIII.— No. 2. 48 



