He became reduced to the greatest straits, and even wanted food and clothing; yet his ardour of investigation remained the same.

Once, when the Institute invited him, as being one of its oldest members, to assist at a SEANCE, his answer was that he regretted he could not attend for want of shoes.

"It was a touching sight," says Cuvier, "to see the poor old man, bent over the embers of a decaying fire, trying to trace characters with a feeble hand on the little bit of paper which he held, forgetting all the pains of life in some new idea in natural history, which came to him like some beneficent fairy to cheer him in his loneliness." The Directory eventually gave him a small pension, which Napoleon doubled; and at length, easeful death came to his relief in his seventy-ninth year.

A clause in his will, as to the manner of his funeral, illustrates the character of the man.

He directed that a garland of flowers, provided by fifty-eight families whom he had established in life, should be the only decoration of his coffin--a slight but touching image of the more durable monument which he had erected for himself in his works.
Such are only a few instances, of the cheerful-working-ness of great men, which might, indeed, be multiplied to any extent.