I will explain. My father naturally loved the country because he was brought up in a village, and when he was small had passed whole days on the banks of the brooks among the insects and the flowers. Instead of yielding to these tastes in a simple manner, he mingled them with his present occupations. He would not have pardoned himself for going to the mountains without studying there the formation of the land; for looking at a flower without determining its character and discovering its name; for taking up an insect without recalling its family and its habits. Thanks to the rigor of his method in all work he arrived at a very complete knowledge of the country; and, when we walked together, this knowledge was the sole subject of our conversation. The landscape of the mountains became a pretext for explaining to me the revolutions of the earth; he passed from that with a clearness of speech which made such ideas intelligible to me, to the hypothesis of Laplace upon nebula, and I saw distinctly in my imagination the planetary protuberances flying off from the burning nucleus, from this torrid sun in rotation. The heavens at night in the beautiful summer months became a kind of map which he deciphered for me, and on which I distinguished the Pole Star, the seven stars of the Chariot, Vega of the Lyre, Sirius, all those inaccessible and formidable worlds of which science knows the volume, the position and almost the very metals of which they are composed. It was the same with the flowers which he taught me to arrange in an herbarium, with the stones which I broke with a little iron hammer, with the insects which I fed or pinned up, as the case might be. Long before object lessons were practiced in the college my father applied to my education first this great maxim: “Give a scientific account of anything we may encounter.” Thus reconciling the pleasantry of his first impressions with the precision acquired in his mathematical studies. I attribute to this teaching the precocious spirit of analysis which was developed in me during my early youth, and which, without doubt, would have turned toward the positive studies if my father had lived. But he could not complete this education, undertaken after a prepared plan of which I have since found trace among his papers. In the course of one of our walks, and on one of the warmest days of summer, in my tenth year, we were overtaken by a storm which wet us to the bones. During the time that it required to reach home in our soaked clothes my father took cold. In the evening he complained of a chill. Two days after an inflammation of the lungs declared itself, and the week following he died.