268 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Your grandfather was a pharmacist; it was at Nancy, in his house, 

 opposite the ducal palace, that you came into the world; and this 

 house, solid, massive and without ornament, is entered through an al- 

 most monumental portal whose worm-eaten posts support a broken 

 pediment bearing the semblance of a boiling pot. Some found a bit 

 of symbolism : the portal is poetry ; the house is prose ; it gives an im- 

 pression of bourgeois simplicity and of settled living which is by no 

 means trivial. Your father, a physician, was a conscientious student, 

 a distinguished practitioner; and the faculty of Nancy, where he took 

 his course, considered him a master of whom they were justly proud, 

 at the same time that the working population saluted in him their 

 benefactor. He was one of those men who, having been led by a noble 

 curiosity into the most emotional and uncertain of professions, practise 

 it with admirable disinterestedness and hold themselves amply repaid 

 if they are so fortunate as to save a human life now and then. For the 

 honor of the nation, there are many of the sort in France; but few 

 have been able, like Dr. Poincare, to discharge the duties of so absorbing 

 a profession, to work in the laboratory, to teach assiduously, and at the 

 same time to travel extensively over Europe. 



Your mother was one of those alert, active women, always in mo- 

 tion and always busy, whose spirit of order, organization and command 

 rules a household. r She also was a native of Lorraine, of an old local 

 family, home-loving, attached and riveted to the soil; the boys, no 

 matter how brilliantly they had begun life, were never easy till they 

 had returned to the home-nest to live, hunting on their estates or super- 

 vising their cultivation; two of your great-uncles joined to their rural 

 tastes an inclination for geometry. Your mother wasted no time on 

 such matters, finding enough to busy her in those occupations which are 

 duties, and which, cheerfully accepted as such, become pleasures. Ah ! 

 what admirable sources of vital energy are these Frenchwomen, honest 

 and shrewd, economical and judicious, sovereign in their own domain 

 and disdainful of the other conquests, constantly busy at reforming the 

 national virtue and transmitting intelligent patriotism to their chil- 

 dren ! ... In your home you found an uncle recently graduated from 

 the Ecole Polytechnique. What a prestige surrounds these young men 

 who, by a mental effort which is sometimes excessive, succeed in ob- 

 taining the first places in their generation, and to how many mistaken 

 choices of vocation does their example lead ! But with you, sir, the 

 vocation had nothing to do with example; you were predestined to 

 mathematics ! This aptitude, in your paternal and maternal family, is 

 transmitted in collateral lines like the throne in the House of Osman, 

 and yourself twice heir of avuncular gifts, I am told that you have 

 selected one of your own nephews for the precious succession. 



You did not wait long to reveal your vocation, and you are justly 



