Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/853

Rh an ancient hat tree. Its salon, carpeted with a dark-green Brussels, such as was in style in the United States perhaps forty years ago, "was decorated with numbers of flower pieces, huge wreaths and bouquets, after the manner in which our mothers did their water colors. They were framed in narrow black or gilt moldings, and some of them still bore in the corner the numbers they had borne in the salons of the sixties.

As for M. Figuier, he had all the alertness, the decision, the energy of the life which surged all about and invaded the street in which he dwelt. In spite of his seventy-five years his form was tall and straight; his bearing was that of an officer rather than that of a writer; in his white face was none of the effacement of character so often seen in the old, no letting down of moral and physical self-control; his eye was ardent, indignant, sad by turns; his speech eloquent, rapid, full of conviction, impatient of contradiction. Yet one saw that he was, like the old houses of the Rue Caumartin, "condemned." His bitter protest against the way in which the journalism of the day treats the popularization of science, his persistency in regarding himself as the one and only popularizer; his despair at the good-natured raillery which the hobbies of his old age had called out, all showed that M. Figuier was out of touch. This mingling of generations, this refusal to believe that his work was done, gave me from the first of our acquaintance an interest in the fine old man which was half pathetic, half humorous.

I have never known a person whose origin and early education were more evident. He proved his southern birth—he was a Languedocian—by his fervor, his imagination, his astonishing plans. He showed his Huguenot parentage by the strength of his convictions.

But these things did not explain why, at thirty years of age, he should have left an excellent position as a professor, after having spent years in the universities of Montpellier and Paris preparing for it, and after having begun and succeeded in original investigations, to become a popularizer of science.

It struck me that a man of his evident pride and culture would have a justifiable satisfaction in remaining among savants and in pursuing the conventional path of university work, especially after he had acquired a sure footing. Why did not M. Figuier accept the scholar's career in which he was so well launched? Why did he take up popularization? I asked him one day.

"It was simple enough," he said. "It is true I had taken my degrees and had a good position, but I had the idea that scientific knowledge, which until then had been almost exclusively the property of the learned, should be put within the reach of the