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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII. No. 682 



knowledge, to be a genius, a thing whioli is very 

 much rarer, but one must still be able to make 

 one's value felt, to push one's self, to extend one's 

 influence and above all things to flatter the great. 

 That talent my father did not have. 



In his time there were two men around whom 

 were grouped all of those who aspired to make a 

 name in science. They were Laplace and Cuvier. 



Around Laplace were grouped all the geometri- 

 cians and the physicists; around Cuvier the nat- 

 uralists. And there was no saving grace to any 

 one outside of these two coteries. It goes without 

 saying that my father belonged to neither. He 

 remained in his comer, making no visits, and 

 receiving only occasional strangers, and the sev- 

 eral students whom he installed in his work room 

 and to whom he opened all of his collections. So 

 no one spoke of him; his most remarkable works 

 passed unnoticed. His ideas, which were new, 

 bold, and too advanced for the time when he 

 wrote, contributed, also, perhaps, to keep him in 

 obscurity, if they did not, indeed, give people an 

 opportunity for ridiculing him. I am willing to 

 believe that it will not always be like this. 



I have spoken of a reason for the discredit 

 which was cast upon the works of my father; but 

 this was not the only one. There was still an- 

 other, and even more grave. It was the disgrace 

 brought upon him by the all-powerful master who 

 then ruled. 



My father loved to penetrate untrodden fields, 

 he avoided paths too clearly marked out; for him 

 accident was a word empty of meaning; he be- 

 lieved that in nature all things were subject to 

 laws as certain as mathematics; but to discover 

 them one must observe the facts, make compari- 

 sons and admit only the explanation which was 

 in concord with all the facts observed. The study 

 of meteorology attracted his attention; he gave 

 himself up to it with the more zeal, since it was 

 a science still in its infancy, a science as he 

 loved them. For a long time people had, indeed, 

 carried out meteorological observations, but these 

 observatioiis no one had been willing to study or 

 to draw from them deductions. My father wished 

 to undertake this task. 



There was then in the Ministry of the Interior 

 an intelligent man, a distinguished scientist, 

 Chaptal. M. Chaptal approved of the project of 

 my father. He created for him an office in his 

 ministry and furnished him with correspondents 

 at different points throughout the country. My 

 father wished to keep the public in touch with the 

 progress which he would have made in the study 

 undertaken by him, and to this end published 



a meteorological year-book in which he had the 

 unfortunate idea of including both memoirs purely 

 scientific and probabilities of the weather to come. 

 This was intended to help along the sale of the 

 work, but it furnished also a weapon for his 

 critics. The astronomers of the Bureau of Longi- 

 tude, furious to see a naturalist exploit a field 

 which they believed belonged to them, hastened to 

 avail themselves of this weapon; they transformed 

 " probabilities " into " predictions," and upon this 

 ground they made a great outcry. A member of 

 the Institute to play the part of a Mathieu Lans- 

 berg! . . . They petitioned the emperor to cause 

 such a scandal to be stopped. The emperor was 

 a member of the Institute and this was not one 

 of the titles of which he was least proud. In a 

 public reception he apostrophized my father 

 sharply on this subject and concluded by telling 

 him that botany should be kept within its proper 

 bounds. ("La botanique! A la bonne heure! ") 

 From that time the ministry deprived my father 

 of his office and his correspondents and stopped 

 the publication of the meteorological year-book. 

 Thus it was that the reprimand of a sovereign 

 before whom the entire world trembled succeeded 

 in placing outside of the scientific pale an old 

 man who petitioned no one, who lived retired, and 

 who sought for nothing but the advancement of 

 human knowledge! 



Nevertheless, of what nature was this old man? 

 Let us examine his career. 



Child, and the last born, of a numerous family, 

 he had been sent to the Jesuits at Amiens and 

 destined to tlie priesthood. There was no other 

 alternative for noble families. He had to be either 

 priest or soldier. All of the elder ones were sol- 

 diers. So my father had to be priest. But it was 

 not his vocation, and when he learned of the death 

 of his father his first words were : " Such being 

 the case, I shall not be a priest." He left the 

 college and returned to his mother, who, not 

 knowing what to do, yielded finally to his wishes 

 and sent him, at the age of fifteen, to the army 

 in Germany, commanded by Marshal de Broglie, 

 to serve as a volunteer. He took with him a 

 letter of recommendation to Colonel de Lastic, 

 who received it with lively dissatisfaction, see- 

 ing only an embarrassment in having so yovmg 

 an apprentice to the trade of war. It was then 

 on the eve of a battle of which I have forgotten 

 the unpronounceable name. We were defeated 

 through the fault of the Prince de Soubise, who 

 failed to effect a junction with the marshal, as 

 had been explicitly arranged in a council of war. 



The French army had to retire. My father 



