At this period Cuvier’s outward appearance was as unlike M. le Baron, as the grub is unlike the butterfly. Absorbed in his multifarious studies, he was careless about disguising the want of elegance in his aspect. His face was pale, very thin, and long, covered with freckles, and encircled by a shock of red hair. His physiognomy was severe and melancholy. He never played at any of the boys’ games, and seemed as insensible of all that was going on around him as a somnambulist. His eye seemed turned inwards; his thoughts moved amid problems and abstractions. Nothing could exceed the insatiable ardour of his intellect. Besides his special administrative studies, he gave himself to Botany, Zoology, Philosophy, Mathematics, and the history of literature. No work was too voluminous, or too heavy for him. He was reading all day long, and a great part of the night. “I remember well,” says Pfaff, “how he used to sit by my bedside going regularly through Bayle’s Dictionary. Falling asleep over my own book, I used to awake, after an hour or two, and find him motionless as a statue, bent over Bayle.” It was during these years that he laid the basis of that extensive erudition which distinguished his works in after life, and which is truly remarkable when we reflect that Cuvier was not in the least a bookworm, but was one of the most active _workers_, drawing his knowledge of details from direct inspection whenever it was possible, and not from the reports of others. It was here also that he preluded to his success as a professor, astonishing his friends and colleagues by the clearness of his exposition, which he rendered still more striking by his wonderful mastery with the pencil. One may safely say that there are few talents which are not available in Natural History; a talent for drawing is pre-eminently useful, since it not only enables a man to preserve observations of fugitive appearances, but sharpens his faculty of observation by the exercise it gives. Cuvier’s facile pencil was always employed: if he had nothing to draw for his own memoirs, or those of his colleagues, he amused himself with drawing insects as presents to the young ladies of his acquaintance—an entomologist’s gallantry, which never became more sentimental.