THE LIFE AND WORKS OF BROWN-SEQUARD. 1 



By M. Berthelot. 



Geber, the Arabian philosopher and chemist, asserts that the perfec- 

 tion of a being depends upon an exact equilibrium among its elements. 

 Whenever that state of equilibrium is obtained, he says, the being 

 becomes immortal, because there is then a complete compensation 

 between its opposing elements and nature. Whatever maybe thought 

 of such reasoning, ideas and definitions of this kind correspond but 

 little with the conditions that affect genius in art and science. In fact 

 power and beauty geuerally are the result of the exaltation of certain 

 qualities developed with an unusual intensity; this constitutes the true 

 originality of genius, and all compensation between contrary aptitudes 

 results in a certain mediocrity. 



These truths have rarely found a more striking application than in 

 the career of Brown-Sequard. He possessed qualities of imagination 

 and of originality characteristic of great discoverers, rather than those 

 habits of precision, accuracy, and application that belong to scientists 

 of repute in their work, scientists that are perhaps more esteemed in 

 the academies because they have fewer imperfections. Still, let us not 

 forget that it is the inventive minds that keep humanity going. 



Brown-Sequard was an inventor, and some of his fundamental ideas, 

 thought to be strange and almost senseless at the time they were 

 expressed, in the crude state in which he frequently left them, have yet 

 shown an originality as marked, perhaps, as those of Pasteur or of Claude 

 Bernard. Brown-Sequard left a profound mark on the biological field 

 because he had a very high ideal of science, an ideal that he pursued in 

 spite of all obstacles with a passionate devotion, sacrificing to it the idols 

 ordinarily worshiped by man — money, position, and honors. In his busi- 

 ness affairs there was the same instability, the same want of balance as 

 in his intellectual career, and he passed an existence as wandering and 

 agitated as that of a scientist of the sixteenth century. He spent his 

 life between two races, the French and the Anglo Saxon, to both of 

 which he belonged by family connections, traversing the routes of the 



l A paper read at the annual public session of the Acadcniie des Sciences, of Paris, 

 December 19, 1898. Translated from the Revue Scientifique, fourth series, Vol. X, 

 pp. 801-812. 



677 



