For a while longer he continued to hearten them with his glowing words. He then remarked that he would retire to rest. It was known on the morrow that he had decided to endeavour to avoid the British squadrons by some four or five weeks' sailing along the African coast. Henceforth day followed day in uneventful monotony. _La Muiron_ kept in sight of the low, unfrequented coast, which was not likely to be reconnoitred by the enemy's ships, and every half league she tacked without venturing out to sea. Bonaparte passed his days in conversation and in reverie. Sometimes he was heard to murmur the names of Ossian and Fingal. Sometimes he asked his aide-de-camp to read aloud Vertot's _Revolutions_[1] or Plutarch's _Lives._ He appeared neither anxious nor impatient, nor preoccupied, more, probably, through a natural disposition to live in the present than as the result of self-control. He seemed to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating that sea which, whether angry or serene, threatened his destiny and divided him from his object. On rising from table, when the weather was fine, he would go on deck and half recline on a gun-carriage in the same somewhat unsociable and forlorn attitude that was his when, as a child, he would lie propped up by his elbows on the rocks of his native isle. The two scientists, the Admiral, the Captain of the frigate and the aide-de-camp, Lavallette, would stand round him. And the conversation, which he carried on by fits and starts, most frequently turned on some new scientific discovery. Monge was not a brilliant talker; but his conversation revealed him as a clear, logical thinker. Inclined to consider utility even in physics, he was always a patriot and a good citizen. Berthollet was a better philosopher and more given to evolving general theories. "It will not do," he said, "to represent chemistry as the mysterious science of metamorphoses, a new Circe, waving her magic wand over nature. Such ideas may flatter vivid imaginations; but they will not satisfy thoughtful minds, who are striving to prove that the transformations of bodies are subject to the general laws of physics." He had a presentiment that the reactions, which the chemist provokes and observes, occur under precise mechanical conditions which some day may be the subject of exact calculation. And, constantly recurring to this idea, he would apply it to a variety of data, known or surmised. One evening Bonaparte, who had no sympathy with pure speculation, brusquely interrupted him: "Your theories...! Mere soap-bubbles born of a breath and dissipated by a breath. Chemistry, Berthollet, is no more than a game when not applied to the requirements of war or industry. In all his researches the man of science should set before him some definite great and useful object, like Monge, who, in order to manufacture gunpowder, sought nitre in cellars and stables."