ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XX1il 
he took honours. He subsequently was attached to the army of the 
Pyrenees as pharmacien. The opportunity afforded by fifteen months’ 
residence among the Pyrenees was not neglected by the young Bron- 
gniart, and he there not only studied the botany and zoology of those 
mountains, but their geological structure also. So ardent was his pur- 
suit of science, that he fell into dangers which his youth prevented 
him from seeing, and he was thrown into prison, suspected of having 
favoured the escape of the naturalist Broussonnet, who fled through 
the Bréche de Rolland from a death with which he was threatened. 
Liberated on the 9th Thermidor, he returned to Paris, and, at the 
recommendation of Fourcroy and Coquebert de Montbret, was at- 
tached to the mining department, as an Ingénieur des Mines. Soon 
afterwards he became Professor of Natural History at the Ecole 
Centrale des Quatre-Nations, and a contributor to the best scientific 
journals of the time. 
In 1800 M. Brongniart was named director of the porcelain 
manufacture at Sévres, at the recommendation of Bertholet, and 
continued in this appointment until his death, thus devoting his 
energies to, and promoting the welfare of that establishment for forty- 
seven years. His well-known ‘ Traité élémentaire de Minéralogie,’ 
appeared in 1807, he being charged with composing this treatise at 
the time that the Imperial University was organised. This work 
became the text-book for the lectures which M. Brongniart, as coad- 
jutor with Hauy, delivered at the Faculté des Sciences, and which he 
continued at the Muséum d’ Histoire Naturelle, when he was called 
upon to succeed his distinguished predecessor, Hauy. 
M. Brongniart did not confine himself to the study of mineral 
substances. He long continued to occupy himself with zoology, and 
to him is due the division of Reptiles into four orders, the Saurians, 
the Batrachians, the Chelonians and the Ophidians. All paleeonto- 
logists* are acquainted with his treatise on the Trilobites, a work 
which was received with so much favour at the time (1822), and 
which paved the way for so many other labours upon these remark- 
able crustaceans, which in the earlier geological periods swarmed by 
myriads, ceasing, however, to form part of the marine fauna of our 
globe even at a very remote epoch. 
When Cuvier was called to Paris, M. Brongniart was among the 
first to appreciate his talents, and to his union with that great 
man geologists owe that important work,— important under so 
many aspects,—the ‘ Hssai sur la Géographie Minéralogique des 
Environs de Paris,’ presented to the Institute i April, 1810. The 
advance in geology made by the appearance of these labours is too 
well known to those whom I now address to render any account of 
them needful. They form one of those great resting-places in the 
progress of knowledge, whence the cultivators of science start with 
renewed vigour. 
In 1815 M. Brongniart was admitted into the Academy of Sciences, 
succeeding Desmarest. In 1817 he travelled in Switzerland, the Alps 
and Italy, accompanied by his son, Adolphe Brongniart, at the time 
of his father’s death, the President of the Academy of Sciences, and 
so well known to us all for the aid he has afforded to our science by 
