disposition were fostered and intensified, by his having the friendship of several young married and single women of good education and position. They made him a polished gentleman, and he used to say that that was the happy time of his life; he had no cares or anxieties, everything smiled on him, yet he was conscious that it must end, and that he must prepare for work and the struggle of life. Politics were always the trouble of the De Candolle family, and they settled the future career of the young botanist. Geneva was about to become a portion of the French Republic, the father of De Candolle lost one-half of his fortune, and the young man went to Paris to learn how to earn his bread after preliminary study. He had a sad parting from the father who had been so good to him, and who loved him so well, and arrived at Paris, being received by an uncle, in March, 1798. After a few days of quietude, which he spent in calling on his former friends, he determined to go into lodgings near the Jardin des Plantes, and to work, leaving pleasure behind him, and to be sought for when he could afford it. He began to study medicine, and led the odd life of a medical student, attended to by old crones in their second childhood, and witnessing all the sad sights of the hospitals. Whenever he could, he made his way to the Botanical Garden, and yet he did not attend the lectures on botany. He found them not consistent with what he knew. But he was ever studying, describing, and observing plants, and, knowing nobody at the gardens, sought out Lamarck, who offered him some articles in his Encyclopædia to write. The articles were written, and mistakes were naturally made, and in after years they were readily acknowledged and set right. But the work did not advance the young botanist in his studies, although it confirmed him in the necessity of examining all the parts of a plant in classifying it, and in paying especial attention to those organs which are the most important to the life and reproduction of the kind. Leaving his lodgings to board with a friend, De Candolle was robbed, as was usual in those days, by his housekeepers; but he got into a worse scrape by being inveigled into a gambling-house, where he lost nearly all the money he had earned. It cured him of that folly. At work he began to make experiments on the action of different gases on the roots of plants, and obtained some curious results; and M. Desfontaines, the Professor of Botany, gave him hints about the correct method of describing plants, so as to enable him to write the letterpress to the plates of a work on those succulent plants called Crassulaceæ, of which the houseleek and stonecrops are familiar examples. Medicine was quite given up; and, in fact, it was hateful to De Candolle, who used to say, “If I make a mistake in naming a plant, I can set it right, but if I had made mistakes as a medical man, who knows how many dear little