Genre:

Essay, Biography

Subjects:

Instinct, Aesthetics, Palaeontology, Amateurism, Collecting, Scientific Practitioners

    Claims that the French painter F Léon Bonvin was 'By his instincts, the result of mysterious transmissions, of which science can only note the effects [...] an artist sensitive to harmonies of all kinds' (37). Also records how Bonvin's father once went 'looking for gypsum in the quarries of the hill of Montmarte [and] found a mammoth's tooth and some antediluvian bones. He took them to the Museum of Natural History, to M. Cuvier, who complimented him and sent him one hundred francs' (38).