| SKETCH OF PAUL BERT. |
IN Paul Bert we have an. example of a man who was able to achieve equal eminence in scientific research and in political life; and one of those extremely rare cases in which the excellence of scientific achievement was not apparently marred by the worker's participation in political activity. Announcing his death in the Chamber of Deputies, in November, 1886, M. de Freycinet said, "The members of the Chamber lose in him an eminent colleague, science one of its most illustrious representatives, and the Government an inestimable fellow-laborer in whom it had placed entire confidence."
M. Bert was born at Auxerre, on the 17th of October, 1833. He pursued his studies in his native town and in Paris, and obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1863. His graduating thesis was upon animal grafting, and in it, M. Gaston Tissandier says, the physiologist marked himself as an eminently original investigator and skillful experimenter. Three years after-ward, in 1866, he was admitted as a Doctor in Natural Science on the basis of a thesis upon the "Vitality of the Animal Tissues." His first labors attracted attention particularly by the interesting and curious nature of the results obtained. Animal grafting, an operation consisting of the removal of a living part and transplanting it so that it shall continue to live on another part of the same individual or on another individual, was studied in a special manner by the young physiologist, who was enabled thereby to shed a new light on the properties of the nerves. This was remarked by Claude Bernard, in whose laboratory he became an assistant, who discerned an ingenious mind in him, and predicted the brilliant future that awaited him. In 1865 the Academy of Sciences decreed to M. Bert the prize in Experimental Physiology. Two years later, in 1867, he was appointed to a chair in the Faculty of Sciences at Bordeaux; and in December, 1869, he was named Professor of Physiology in the Faculty of Sciences in Paris, as Bernard's successor. Here, in the possession of a vast field of study, M. Bert, with the financial aid of Dr. Jourdanet, constructed costly and magnificent apparatus for the execution of experiments on barometric pressure in relation to the effects it exerts on the organism. Dr. Jourdanet, having removed from the borders of the Gulf of Mexico to the highlands of Anahuac, had observed differences in pathological conditions, which he discovered, to his surprise, were not simply such as result from temperature or are paralleled in places of lower level and higher latitude, but presented peculiarities which he conceived to be dependent on the elevation of the situation alone. Among these conditions was
