Guyon de Morveau, Baron Louis Bernard, a celebrated chemist, known also as an advocate of eminence, and less advantageously, in his political character, as a regicide, was the son of Antony Guyon de Morveau and Margaret de Saulle his wife, and born at Dijon, on the 4th of January 1737.

His father was of a respectable family, and filled the situation of professor of the civil law in the university of Dijon. He was fond of building; and, from the artificers who were frequently employed about his house, young Guyon appears to have derived, almost in his infancy, a taste for mechanical pursuits, which led to an astonishing development of premature talent. For when he was only seven years old, he prevailed on his father to purchase, for his amusement, a clock which was greatly out of repair, and, as is said, he actually put it together and remedied its defects, without any assistance, so effectually, that it continued to go extremely well for fifty or sixty years afterwards. The next year he was equally successful in cleaning and repairing a watch belonging to his mother. But notwithstanding these remarkable exertions of ingenuity, it does not appear that they depended on any particular bent of the genius to the cultivation of the mechanical arts; at least no such bias was ever exhibited in any of his subsequent pursuits. His education was conducted in the ordinary manner at a provincial school or college, which he left at sixteen. Upon his return home he applied, for a short time, to botany, and he was soon afterwards admitted as a student of law in the university of Dijon, where he remained for three years, and then removed to Paris, in order to continue his studies at the bar. In 1756, he paid a visit to Voltaire at Ferney; and he seems to have imbibed from this personage a taste for satirical poetry, which he soon afterwards displayed, upon the occurrence of a trifling accident, in a ceremony relating to a popular Jesuit of the day. Amongst his posthumous papers, he also left some unfinished sketches of tragedies, which are said not to have been deficient in poetical merit.

At the age of twenty-four, when he made some progress