An industrious, simple, loving, clever man was the father, and he married Mademoiselle Brière. De Candolle wrote of his mother: “She was an educated woman, good, fond of fun, and clever; she was gifted with all the graces and virtues of the mind, and she contributed by her amiable conversations and teachings to give me a taste for science and literature. She had only one fault, and it strangely enough influenced my character. She was proud of her family, which she considered was superior in station to that of my father, because her mother was a distant relation of La Fort, the minister of Peter the Great of Russia. She took every opportunity of making my father feel this pretended superiority, so that when he became forty-eight years of age, he thought that he would make himself known to his relatives and take up his nobility in Provence, and show his wife that his descent was better than hers. But my father took every opportunity of teaching me that ability alone was the real distinction amongst men, and that nobility by itself was nothing, and was a matter of accident. So that my mother’s exaggerated family notions, and my father’s wise precepts, coming as they did to me, during times of political change, developed in me a sincere love for freedom, and a contempt for all success except that which was deserved.” De Candolle was born when his father was in active office, and the earliest recollections of the future naturalist were about his father’s military command, and the endeavours of this good citizen to pacify the populace and the ruling powers, who were always in opposition. The little fellow was always ill, and lost much of the outdoor play of his companions; but there was compensation, for he learned to read fairly soon, and at five years of age he used to read and pretend to act plays; and his heart was in his studies, for when M. de Florian, an author, came to see the family, the child told him that he was going to write comedies, and had acted them. At seven years of age he was far in advance, and then came illness—scarlet fever, ear-ache, and threatening brain disease. He used to say in after years that he well remembered seeing everything looking double. His recovery was very slow, and he was taken to the country to a brisk air, and then he began to be robust, and for fifty years after he never spent a day in bed. But his father did not send him to the public school; he employed a tutor, and the child learned nothing during three years. Then came a little country life, and the friendship of a man, a distinguished naturalist, Mr. Charles Bonnet. His first start in science was homely enough. His mother used to collect the herbs and fruit out of the garden, and the boy used to arrange what she gathered, keeping the different kinds separate with an exactitude that made everybody amazed. He said that he ought to arrange the fruit according to their natures.