It may be pointed out that the same thing happened with regard to Ohm, only it was much more serious. Years of Ohm's life were wasted because of the refusal of his contemporaries to accept his "law" at his valuation. Arago, in his life of Ampère, recalls that when Fresnel discovered the transverse character of waves of light, his observations created the same doubts and uncertainty in the same individuals who a few years later refused to accept Ampère's conclusions. Arago puts it, that as he was ambitious of a high place in the world of ideas, he should have expected to find his adversaries precisely those already occupying the highest places. Ampère never looked on himself as a mere specialist in physical science, however, and it is extremely interesting to know that he dared to take sides in a discussion between Cuvier and Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, with regard to the unity of structure in organized beings. While the purely physical scientists mostly sat mute during the discussion, Ampère took an active share in it, and ventured to subject himself to what perhaps, above all things, a Frenchman dreads, the ridicule of his colleagues. Arago thought that he held his own very well in this discussion, which involved some of the ideas that were afterwards to be the subject of profound study and prolonged investigation later in the nineteenth century, because of the announcement of the theory of evolution. After his discoveries in electricity Ampère came to be acknowledged as one of the greatest of living scientists, and was honored as such by most of the distinguished scientific societies of Europe. His work was not confined to electricity alone, however, and late in life he prepared what has been well called a remarkable work on the classification of the sciences. This showed that, far from being a mere electrical specialist or even a profound thinker in physics, he understood better probably than any man of his time the interrelations of the sciences to one another. He was a broad-minded, profound thinker in the highest sense of the words, and in many things seems to have had almost an intuition of the intimate processes of nature; a sharer in secrets as yet unrevealed, though he was at the same time an untiring experimenter, eminently successful, as is so evident in his electrical researches, in arranging experiments so as to compel answers to the questions which he put to nature.