But here, too, the audience is sparse, mixed, disunited and unsatisfactory; the lectures being public and free, everybody enters the room and leaves as he pleases during the lecture.

Many of the attendants are idlers who seek distraction in the tone and gestures of the professors, or birds of passage who come there to warm themselves in winter and to sleep in summer.

Nevertheless, two or three foreigners and half a dozen Frenchmen thoroughly learn Arabic or zoology from Silvestre de Sacy, Cuvier or Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

That answers the purpose; they are quite enough, and, elsewhere too in the other branches of knowledge.

All that is required is a small elite of special and eminent men--about one hundred and fifty in France in the various sciences,[6232] and, behind them, provisionally, two or three hundred others, their possible successors, competent and designated beforehand by their works and celebrity to fill the gaps made by death in the titular staff as these occur.