Thus it was on the ruin of all the old teaching, that the new institution was erected; a truly _revolutionary_ school, as its founders delighted to call it, using the term as it was then commonly used, as a synonym for all that was excellent. And then for the first time avowing the principle of public competition, its founders, Monge and Fourcroy, began their work with an energy and enthusiasm which they seem to have left as a traditional inheritance to their school. It is curious to see the difficulties which the bankruptcy of the country threw in their way, and the vigor with which, assisted by the summary powers of the republican government, they overcame them. They begged the old Palais Bourbon for their building; were supplied with pictures from the Louvre; the fortunate capture of an English ship gave them some uncut diamonds for their first experiments; presents of military instruments were sent from the arsenals of Havre; and even the hospitals contributed some chemical substances. In fine, having set their school in motion, the government and its professors worked at it with such zeal and effect, that within five months after their project was announced, they had held their first entrance examination, open to the competition of all France, and started with three hundred and seventy-nine pupils. The account of one of these first pupils, who is among the most distinguished still surviving ornaments of the Polytechnic, will convey a far better idea of the spirit of the young institution than could be given by a more lengthy description. M. Biot described to us vividly the zeal of the earliest teachers, and the thirst for knowledge which, repressed for awhile by the horrors of the period, burst forth with fresh ardor amongst the French youth of the time. Many of them, he said, like himself, had been carried away by the enthusiasm of the revolution, and had entered the army. “My father had sent me,” he added, “to a mercantile house, and indeed I never felt any great vocation to be a soldier, but _Que voulez vous? les Prussiens etaient en Champagne._” He joined the army, served two years under Dumouriez, and returned to Paris in the reign of terror, “to see from his lodgings in the Rue St. Honore the very generals who had led us to victory, Custine and Biron, carried by in the carts to the guillotine. “Imagine what it was when we heard that Robespierre was dead, and that we might return safely to study after all this misery, and then to have for our teachers La Place, Lagrange, and Monge. We felt like men brought to life again after suffocation. Lagrange said, modestly, “Let me teach them arithmetic.” Monge was more like our father than our teacher; he would come to us in the evening, and assist us in our work till midnight, and when he explained a difficulty to one of our _chefs de brigade_, it ran like an electric spark through the party.” The pupils were not then, he told us,