In effect, it may be declared emphatically that no one has a right to claim the exclusive merit of the brilliant discoveries of the past century. Sci… - Marcellin Berthelot

Your sympathy makes the lamp which is on the point of being extinguished in the everlasting night shine with a final brilliancy. The respect which humanity shows to aged persons is the expression of the solidarity which unites the present generations to those which have gone before and to those which will follow.

There abides in nature a certain form of matter which, being discovered and brought by art to perfection, converts to itself, proportionally, all imperfect bodies that it touches. ...It rested on the indisputable appearance of an indefinite cycle of transformations, reproducing themselves in chemical operations, without either beginning or end.

Hence the rôle of savants, as individuals and as a social class, has unceasingly developed in modern states. But our duties towards other men increase in the same ratio, and let it never be forgotten; let it proclaimed in this hall, in this palace of French science.