Personally, Coulomb was noted for great seriousness of character, though with this was mingled a gentleness of disposition that made for him some cordial friendships among his scientific contemporaries. He had but few friends, but those who were admitted to his intimacy made up by the depth of their affection for the smallness of their number. Even those who had occasion to meet him but once or twice, carried away from their meeting an affectionate remembrance of his kindliness and courtesy and readiness to help wherever he could be of service. He was extremely happy in his family relations, and this proved to be a great source of consolation to him during the years when the progress of the French Revolution took him away from science and made him almost despair of his country. It is not surprising that Biot, the great French physicist, in writing of Coulomb in his Mélanges Scientifiques et Littéraires, Vol. III. (Paris, 1858), should have held Coulomb up as a model of the simple, earnest, helpful life and as a man of the most exemplary character. He says: "Coulomb lived among the men of his time in patience and charity. He was distinguished among them mainly by his separation from their passions and their errors, and he always maintained himself calm, firm and dignified _in se totus teres atque rotundus_, as Horace says, a complete, perfect and well-rounded character." Few men have deserved so noble a eulogy as this, written nearly fifty years after his death, by one who had known Coulomb himself and his contemporaries well; it has none of the exaggeration of a funeral panegyric, and is evidently founded on details of knowledge with regard to the great electrician which had become a tradition among French scientists, and which Biot has forever crystallized into the history of science by his emphatic expression. One could scarcely wish for a better epitaph than Biot's summing up of Coulomb's personal character: "All those who knew Coulomb know how the gravity of his character was tempered by the sweetness of his disposition, and those who had the happiness to meet him at their entrance into a scientific career have kept the most tender remembrance of his gentle good-heartedness." [Illustration: HANS CHRISTIAN OERSTED] FOOTNOTES: [21] Collection de Memoires relatifs à La Physique Publiés Par la Société Française de Physique. Tome I., Mémoires de Coulomb. Paris. Gauthier-Villars, Imprimeur-Libraire Du Bureau des Longitudes, de L'École Polytechnique, Quai des Augustins, 55, 1884. [22] Catholic Churchmen in Science, the Dolphin Press, Philadelphia, 1906. CHAPTER VII. HANS CHRISTIAN OERSTED.