incomplete.  Before establishing great schools of specialists and regulating the method of recruiting for them, where were the great thinkers who could bear in mind the relation of such institutions to human powers, balancing advantages and injuries, and studying the past for the laws of the future?  What inquiry has been made as to the condition of exceptional men, who, by some fatal chance, knew human sciences before their time?  Has the rarity of such cases been reckoned—­the result examined?  Has any enquiry been made as to the means by which such men were enabled to endure the perpetual strain of thought?  How many, like Pascal, died prematurely, worn-out by knowledge?  Have statistics been gathered as to the age at which those men who lived the longest began their studies?  Who has ever known, does any one know now, the interior construction of brains which have been able to sustain a premature burden of human knowledge?  Who suspects that this question belongs, above all, to the physiology of man?

For my part, I now believe the true general law is to remain a long time in the vegetative condition of adolescence; and that those exceptions where strength of organs is produced during adolescence result usually in the shortening of life.  Thus the man of genius who is able to bear up under the precocious exercise of his faculties is an exception to an exception.

If I am right, if what I say accords with social facts and medical observations, then the system practised in France in her technical schools is a fatal impairment and mutilation (in the style of La Quintinie) practised upon the noblest flower of youth in each generation.

  But it is better to continue my history, and add my doubts as the
  facts develop themselves.

When I entered the Ecole Polytechnique, I worked harder than ever and with even more ardor, in order to leave it as triumphantly as I had entered it.  From nineteen to twenty-one I developed every aptitude and strengthened every faculty by constant practice.  Those two years were the crown and completion of the first three, during which I had only prepared myself to do well.  Therefore my pride was great when I won the right to choose the career that pleased me most,—­either military or naval engineering, artillery, or staff duty, or the civil engineering of mining, and ponts et chaussees.[*] By your advice, I chose the latter.

[*] Department of the government including everything connected with
    the making and repairing of roads, bridges, canals, etc.