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BIOGRAPHIES OF SCIENTIFIC MEN

Panthéon (the Westminster Abbey of Paris) was the church of St Geneviève, and its foundation stone was laid by Louis XV. in 1764. In 1885 it was secularized, under the name it now bears, and all traces of religious worship were removed. The frescoes in the interior, by Puvis de Chavannes, Laurens, Cabanel, and others, are among the finest compositions of the nineteenth century. In the crypt were buried the remains of Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabeau, Marat, Victor Hugo, and others; and it was Berthelot who, in 1897, was instrumental in having Voltaire's and Rousseau's sarcophagi opened to see if their bodies had been tampered with, as stated, but the great philosophers' remains had not been removed. Berthelot, in examining the remains of Rousseau, found fragments of the winding-sheet substances of an antiseptic and aromatic nature, such as are used in embalming, some teeth, and even a little hair still adhering to the frontal part of the skull, and forming a sort of crown, or tonsure, like that of monks.