DUMONT D’URVILLE, Jules Sébastien César (1790-1842), a French navigator, born in the town of Condé-sur-Noireau, in Normandy. The death of his father, who before the revolution had held a judicial post in Condé, devolved the care of his education on his mother and his maternal uncle, the Abbé De Croisilles. Failing to pass the entrance examination for the Ecole Polytechnique, he went to sea in 1807 as a novice on board the “Aquilon,” and soon attracted the attention of the captain, Maignon, by his studious disposition. During the next twelve years he gradually rose in his profession, and continued through all its multitudinous vicissitudes to increase his scientific and linguistic acquisitions: botany, entomology, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and even Hebrew and Greek were added to the more professional branches. In 1820, while engaged in a survey of the Mediterranean under Captain Gauthier of the “Chevrette,” he was fortunate enough to recognize the Venus of Milo in a Greek statue recently unearthed, and to secure its preservation by the report he presented to the French ambassador at Constantinople. A wider field for his energies was furnished in 1822 by the exploring expedition of the “Coquille” under the command of his friend Duperrey; and on its return in 1825 his services were rewarded by promotion to the rank of capitaine de frégate, and he was intrusted with the control of a similar enterprise. The “Astrolabe,” as he new-named the “Coquille,” left Toulon on April 25, 1826, and reached Marseilles again on 25th of March 1829,—having traversed the South Atlantic, coasted the Australian continent from .King George’s Sound to Port Jackson, laid down various parts of New Zealand, and visited the Fiji Islands, the Loyalty Islands, ...