Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/51

Rh studies in saponification, and had given to the world star or adamantine candles, which were a greater improvement over the tallow-dips and dim lamps which the common people of that day had to get along with than the electric light is over our gas-lights and petroleumlamps.

An item recently appeared in the newspapers saying that the other day his Excellency Tcheou-Meou-Ki, Director of the Chinese Mission of Public Instruction, paid a visit, with the mandarins attached to his person, to M.Chevreul in Paris, He handed to the illustrious chemist a Chinese document expressing in old characters every wish for his happiness and long life. It appears that there is living at this moment in China a Chinese savant who at the age of one hundred years has just passed his examination, and been admitted a member of the highest academy of the mandarins. The interpreter explained to M.Chevreul that his Chinese visitors considered that the fact that two savants a hundred years of age were living, one in France and the other in China, was a link connecting the learning of the two countries.

A correspondent of the "Pall Mall Gazette" recently visited M.Chevreul in his study bedroom at nine o'clock in the evening. He found him in bed, reading a play of Molière's, "and as cheery and hearty as a young man of twenty. He has decidedly an ancient look about him. His skin is well furrowed and wrinkled, and his hand shaky; but his eyes are not dim, nor is bis natural mental strength abated. His memory is something marvelous. He remembered the horrors and bloody days of the Terror as vividly as the struggles and rise of the Third Republic." He talked about the theatres, Shakespeare, and Molière, whom, like a true Frenchman, he preferred, and added: "I don't know if among the English there is the same admiration for the classics as in France. We have always professed a great love for the classics, but the word 'classic' is too often applied to things that have nothing classic about them. Then we have other schools, the romantic and others. But I don't find much in recent writers. They have got a great many new words, but work on the old ideas. They keep on reproducing the old ideas over and over again, and do not give us many new thoughts." And he repeated several times, "It is very easy to give new names to very old things."

The old man, says the correspondent, "prattled on from one subject to another, speaking slowly and distinctly. 'We have in France,' he observed, 'a school that has a considerable number of adherents who say that man was descended from the monkeys. But if you accept that doctrine, you do away with the perfectibility of species.' M.Chevreul does not always lie in bed and read Molière. Until last December he went about as well as he had done fifty years before. Now he goes about the garden and the museums, attends the Academy of Sciences every week, and frequently reads papers; goes regularly to the meetings of the Agricultural Society and the offices of the '-