Jean- Baptiste-André- Dumas, 298 
difficult to realize his age. He took a lively interest in all 
questions of chemical philosophy, which he discussed with 
great earnestness and warmth. There was the same fire and 
the same exuberance of fancy which had enchanted me in his 
lectures thirty years before. At an age when most men hold 
speculation in small esteem, I was much struck with bis criti- 
cism of a contemporary, who, he said, had no imagination, 
although he spoke with the highest praise of his experimental 
skill. At that time Dumas showed no signs of impaired strength. 
But during the following year his health began to fail, and he 
died on the 11th of April, at Cannes, where he had sought a 
retreat from the severity of the winter climate of Paris. 
umas was one of the few men whose greatness cannot be 
estimated from a single point of veiw. He was not only emi- 
nent as an investigator of nature, but even more eminent as a 
teacher and an administrator. Beginning the study of chemis- 
try at the culmination of the epoch of the Lavoisierian system, 
and regarding, as he always did, the author of that system with 
the greatest admiration, he nevertheless was the first to discover 
the weak point in its armor and inflict the wound which led to 
its overthrow. Without attempting to detail Dumas’s numer- 
tors and products concerned in a chemical process bear to 
each other definite proportions, but also, when the materials 
are aeriform, the relative volumes preserve an equally defi- 
h ites, “‘in a series of experiments in- 
tended to fix the atomic weights of a considerable number of. 
