expressly for the occasion by M.Alcan, entitled "Hommage à, M.Chevreul,"written by Berthelot, who also presented a copy to the Academy, Charles Richet, Pouchet, Grimaux, E.Gautier, Dujardin Beaumetz, and Demarçay. The inhabitants of the Rue Chevreul sent him a fine nosegay. Another deputation presented him with a nosegay which, according to M.H.de Varigny's description in "Science," "was a masterpiece of art in the choice and distribution of colors. No more delicate allusion could be made to the venerable master's theory of complementary colors; and it was understood by the whole crowd, being exemplified in an unparalleled manner."
M.Gaston Tissandier has published in "La Nature" some incidents relating to M.Chevreul's career, additional to those which we gave in our sketch of him in August, 1885, or which throw a fuller light upon the facts presented in that article.
The life of the old philosopher has been up to this time spent between the Museum of Natural History, the Gobelins, and the Institute of France, and he has very seldom failed to be present at the Monday meetings of the Academy of Sciences. The memoirs which he has presented to his colleagues can hardly be counted. Among them may be mentioned one which he published in 1832 on the divining-rod, and another in 1853 on the tipping-tables, in which he scattered as with a breath all that was mysterious about the manifestations; and he rendered to science the service of demonstrating how the operator is the dupe of a charlatanism of which he is often the involuntary accomplice.
Although M.Chevreul had no taste for politics, he has been a man among his fellow-men, and a true patriot. During the Franco-Prussian War, when he was eighty-six years old, he remained in Paris through all the privations of the siege, and even stuck to the museum while more than eighty Prussian bombs were whizzing through it, making rubbish of the galleries and breaking up the glass cases. More than one of these projectiles burst close to the laboratory in which the brave old man was engaged in his work. He filed an indignant declaration of protest respecting this outrage, in the minutes of the Academy of the 9th of January, 1871, which runs as follows:
"The Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in Paris by the edict of King Louis XIII, in the month of January, 1626—become the Museum of Natural History by decree of the Convention, on the 10th of June, 1793—was bombarded, in the reign of William I, King of Prussia, the Count of Bismarck being Chancellor, by the Prussian army, on the night of the 8th and 9th of January, 1871. Till then, it had been respected by all parties and by all powers, national and foreign,
"E.Chevreul, Director."
It was on the occasion of this declaration that M.Chevreul wrote to the Abbé Lamazon a letter in which he designated himself the dean
