298 Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas. 
one comprises his course on the Philosophy of Chemistry, de- 
livered at the College of France in 1836; the other contains 
only a single lecture, accompanied by notes, entitled “‘ The Bal- 
ance of Organic Life,” which was delivered at the Medical 
School of Paris, August 20, 1841. In both these volumes will 
be found the beauty of exposition and the elegance of diction 
of which we have spoken, and they are models of literary style. 
But of course the sympathetic enthusiasm of the great man’s 
presence cannot be reproduced by written words. 
The lecture on “The Balance of Organic Life” was prob- 
ably the most remarkable of Dumas’s literary efforts. It dealt’ 
simply with the relations that the vegetable sustains to the © 
animal kingdom through the atmosphere, which, though now 
so familiar, were then not generally understood; and the late 
Dr. Jeffries Wyman, who heard the lecture, always spoke of it 
with the greatest enthusiasm. 
As might be expected, Dumas’s oratory found an ample field - 
in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate; and whether 
setting forth a project of recasting the copper coinage or a law 
of drainage, or ridiculing the absurd theories of homeopathy, 
he riveted the attention of his colleagues as completely as he 
had entranced the students at the Sorbonne. : 
In the early part of his life, Dumas was a voluminous writer, 
and in 1828 published the “Traité de Chimie appliquée aux 
Arts,” in eight large octavo volumes, with an atlas of plates 
in quarto. But besides this extended treatise, the two volumes _ “- 
of Lectures just referred to are bis only important literary . 
works. He published numerous papers in scientific journals, 
which, as we have seen, produced a most marked effect on the 
growth of chemical science. But the number of his mono- 
graphs is not large compared with those of many of his contem- 
poraries, and his work is to be judged by its importance an 
influence rather than by the extent of the field which it covers. 
n his capacity of President of the Municipal Council at Paris, 
of Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, of Vice-President 
of the High Council of Education, and of Perpetual Secretary 
of the Academy of Sciences, Dumas had abundant opportunity 
for the exercise of his administrative ability, and no one nas 
questioned his great powers in this direction; but in regard to 
his political career we could not expect the same unanimity of 
opinion. That he was a liberal under Louis Philippe, and a 
reactionist under Louis Napoleon, may possibly be reconciled 
with a fixed political faith and an unswerving aim for the pub- 
lic good; but his scheme for “civilian billetting” (by which 
wealthy people having rooms to spare in their houses would 
ave been compelled to billet artisans employed in public 
works) leads one to infer that his statesmanship was not equ 
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