Memoirs of DeCandolle._ - 13 
the Collége de France, as a substitute for Cuvier, during the tem- 
porary absence of the latter, giving a course of vegetable physi- 
ology in place of one on general natural history ;—how he pre- 
pared to take the degree of M.D. in order to qualify himself as a 
candidate for the chair of medical natural history at the School 
of Medicine, then vacant; but how Richard, who disliked him 
because he was a pupil of Desfontaines, as DeCandolle says, in- 
Stigated Jussieu to offer himself for this chair, upon which of 
course DeCandolle withdrew, but nevertheless wrote and sus- 
tained as a thesis for the doctorate, his Essay on the Medical 
Properties of Plants, compared with their exterior forms and 
their natural classification. He bore his examination creditably, 
received his diploma, and, the same evening, a private mock 
Inauguration, which, considering the parties engaged in it, must 
have been irresistably comical. 
“Duméril invited to his house my family, my comrades of the Bulletin 
Philomathique, and even some of the Professors of the Ecole de Medicine. 
This grave assembly amused themselves in giving me the reception, in full 
dress, from the Malade imaginaire. It was a curious sight to see Cuvier, 
Lacroix, Biot, and other learned Academicians rehearsing the scene from 
Moliére in the costumes of the Comédie Frangaise. They had smothered 
me in an immense sugar-loaf paper cap ornamented all over with little 
lamps all alight. In the motion of bowing I constantly expected to be set 
On fire, But the acolyte who conducted me would then press a sponge 
Well filled with water borne on the top of the cap, and the water ran 
down, not upon the lamps, but upon my head,—the audience laughing 
uproariously at my surprise.” 
t ass on to more serious matters, and rapidly sketch 
the outlines of the scientific career now fairly and promisingly 
Opening. For the event which fixed DeCandolle in his true field 
Of labor was his arrangement (in 1802) with Lamarck—who had 
ong since abandoned botany—to prepare a new edition of the 
re Francaise. The arrangement was a favorable one to 
Candolle, both financially and scientifically. The new edition 
Was of course an entirely new work, one particularly adapted to 
DeCandolle’s genius, aa, which gave him at once a wide reputa- 
tion. Indirectly this work gave origin to the botanical explora- 
ions of the provinces of France, under the auspices of the 
unknown nor uninfluential in the Paris of half a century ago. 
Indeed DeCandolle (let us hope without sufficient grounds) 
Toundly charges lamentable weakness to nd less cred- 
Nomination and canvass; while of the Abbé Hauy he relates, to 
