Napoleon had been a good and a diligent student. The fascinating but hateful characteristics of his later career, when he was the Emperor with a heart petrified and corroded by ambition, the conqueror ever greedy of fresh conquest, the scourge of nations and the tyrant of kings, too often make one overlook the liberal instincts of his earlier years. His passion for knowledge was profound, and he was the pronounced friend of every genuine man of science, of every movement having for its object the acquisition and diffusion of fresh enlightenment. It is an English writer* (* Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century 1 152 to 154.) who says of him that he was, "amongst the great heroes and statesmen of his age, the first and foremost if not the only one, who seemed thoroughly to realise the part which science was destined to play in the immediate future"; and the same author adds that "some of the glory of Laplace and Cuvier falls upon Napoleon." He took pleasure in the company and conversation of men of science; and never more so than during the period of the Consulate. Thibaudeau's memoirs show him dining one night with Laplace, Monge, and Berthollet; and the English translator of that delightful book* (* Dr. Fortescue, page 273. Compare also Lord Rosebery, Napoleon, the Last Phase page 234: "In the first period of his Consulate he was an almost ideal ruler. He was firm, sagacious, far-seeing, energetic, just.") emphasises the contrast between the "just and noble sanity of the First Consul of 1802 and the delirium of the Emperor of 1812." The failure to keep that difference in mind--to recognise that the Bonaparte of the early Consulate was capable of exalted ideals for the general well-being that were foreign to the Napoleon of ten years later--is fruitful of mistakes in interpreting his activities. On April 8 he attended a seance of the Institute, and was there instrumental in reconciling several persons who had become estranged through events which occurred during the Revolution.* (* Aulard, Paris sous le Consulat, 1 252.) He was therefore on good terms with this learned body, and was himself a member of that division of it which was devoted to the physical and mathematical sciences.* (* Thibaudeau (English edition) page 112.) It was quite natural, then, that when the national representatives of scientific thought in France approached him with a proposition that was calculated to make his era illustrious by a grand voyage of exploration which should complete man's knowledge of the great continents, the First Consul gave a ready consent.