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of Edinburgh , Session 1876 - 77 . 
la poesie, etudes d’Esthetique.” Ilis other works are, u Course a 
Chamonix, conte fantastique” (1838); “ Essai sur les proprietes et 
la tactique des fusees de guerre” (Turin, 1848); “ Mystere des 
Bardes de l’lsle de Bretagne;” two “ Essais sur des Inscriptions 
G-auloises,” and many articles in reviews and other periodicals. 
M. Pictet was a Member of the Koyal Irish Academy, of the 
Ethnographic Society of New York, of the Academie Stanislas of 
Nancy, as well as a Fellow of this Society. From Napoleon III. 
he received the decorations of the Legion of Honour and of St 
Maurice and St Lazare. He was elected an Honorary Fellow in 
1804. He died 20th December 1875. 
Adolphe-Theodore Brongxtart was born at Paris on the 14th 
January 1801. He was the son of Alexandre Brongniart, the 
celebrated naturalist and associate of Cuvier, who died in 1847. 
Devoted from childhood to the study of the natural sciences, in 
which he was encouraged as well by the example as by the counsels 
of his father, Adolphe, while preparing to take his degree of doctor 
of medicine, cultivated at the same time with earnestness and suc- 
cess botany and geology. In 1822 he published a monograph on 
the classification and distribution of fossil vegetables ; three years 
later he published a work on Champignons , in which he embraced 
the whole of that family in a natural classification of its genera; 
and in 1826 he presented to the Academie des Sciences a “ Memoire 
sur la generation et le d^veloppement de Fembryon vegetal,” for 
which he received the first prize for experimental physiology. In 
this work a new light was thrown on the most important fact in 
the life of plants; and if it cannot be said that he entirely lifted 
the veil which had hitherto covered the mystery of fecundation, 
he advanced very near to the complete explanation of that phe- 
nomenon. The course on which he had thus entered of scientific 
investigation he pursued with unabated energy to the close of his 
life. The number of investigations which he conducted, and the 
papers which he presented to scientific societies and to the scientific 
world through the press, indicate an almost unprecedented amount 
of activity on his part. His most important work is his “ Histoire 
des Vegetaux Fossiles,” which unfortunately was left unfinished 
by him. In this work new light is thrown on both botany and 
