ch is legislative genius.
Europe has had no true legislators since Jesus Christ, who, not
having given to the world a political code, left his work
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 milita