Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/566

550 . The policy of the law in giving individuals power to propagate their ideas for an indefinite period after death should be reversed, and their ideas should be put on the same footing as their preferences for individuals, to whom property can be limited for a few years only. In this case the monstrous egotism which leads to a large number of endowments would be cut off; and future generations would not be taxed in order that Jones or Robinson, dead fifty years since, might have the posthumous pleasure of having a college called after him. When competition and change in public sentiment have brought about this state of things, educators will have to let go of the cherished but unscientific idea that their judgment is better than the inclination and judgment combined of the students, and that it is their duty to force dull studies on unwilling minds. And the social organism will then, in this department also, carry on its processes of growth and development, waste and repair, in the same unfettered and natural manner in which the animal organism maintains and enlarges its life.

 

AUL GERVAIS was eminent as a zoölogist and as a paleontologist. Born in Paris on the 16th of September, 1816, he died in March, 1879, having lived a life exclusively devoted to science. By his entire consecration to study, says M. Blanchard in his "Eulogy," he reached the most enviable positions, conquering them with only his natural talents, courage, perseverance, and assiduity in work; for he had at the beginning of his career neither the resources which make existence easy, nor the certainties which give confidence as to the future. In early youth, yielding to his native tastes, he was accustomed to frequent the woods around Paris, to observe and study natural objects. His first scientific paper was published when he was seventeen years old, in the "Magasin de Zoölogie," and was an account of a new species of Souï, the Cinnyris Adalberti. His attention was directed at 