IV 



that lie was able to move about without help, and to arrange and 

 label fossils received from Professor de Koninck on the 15th June, he 

 was seized with a violent pain in the heart on the morning of the 

 16fch, and before medical aid could be procured he was called to his 

 long-earned rest. 



It is proposed by the Government to purchase his collection of 

 minerals, fossils, library, and geological maps, and with them to form 

 a nucleus, under the name of the "Clarke Collection," of a grand 

 Mining Museum. 



Adolphe Theodore Brongniart, son of the illustrious Alexandre 

 Brongniart, and grandson of Theodore Brongniart, an eminent archi- 

 tect, was born at Paris on the 14th January, 1801. Educated for the 

 medical profession, he soon gave up that career in order to devote 

 himself, under his father's guidance, to scientific pursuits, and early 

 took a place among the first living botanists. In his nineteenth year 

 he published his first and only zoological paper, containing the descrip- 

 tion of Limnaclia, a new genus of Crustacea. In the following year he 

 established the genus Geratojjteris for a curious and anomalous aquatic 

 fern. In his twenty-first year he published his first palseontological 

 memoir on the classification and distribution of fossil plants. He 

 reviewed, in this paper, the various plant-remains then known, and 

 grouped them in 4 classes and 19 genera. This memoir has been 

 described as the starting point of the intelligent study of fossil plants. 

 From this beginning Brongniart continued his labours and expounded 

 the fragmentary remains of extinct floras, and traced their relation to 

 living plants, and their position in the vegetable kingdom. He was 

 singularly fitted for this work, for he already had an extensive ac- 

 quaintance with the structure and classification of living plants, and 

 he had so digested his knowledge that he was able to utilize it in the 

 study of these obscure fossils. Seldom has a man made a more 

 brilliant debut than Adolphe Brongniart. The memoir on the classifi- 

 cation and distribution of fossil plants, and another, which threw an 

 entirely new light on the subject of the fertilization of living plants, 

 were already finished, if not published, when he was about twenty-four 

 years of age. 



The study of the reproduction of organic beings had, up to his 

 time, made so little progress that Brongniart obtained little assistance 

 from previous workers. Without committing himself to any of the 

 theories which had been suggested in explanation of the processes of 

 fertilization, he confined himself to the observation and arrangement of 

 facts. "II est certains sujets," he says, " dont la difficulty eloigne et 

 rebute les observateurs, tandis que la grandeur de leurs consequences 

 excite au plus haut degre l'imagination des hommes disposes a se 

 contenter d'une hypothese. Quant a moi, j'ai cherche d'abord a les 



