SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF FRANCIS HUBER. 487 



his health. At the age of fifteen he found himself not only utterly- 

 prostrated in strength, but threatened with blindness. His father, in 

 alarm, took him to Paris, to consult the celebrated Tronchin, who or- 

 dered him to the country. At the village of Stani, near Paris, he led 

 the life of an ordinary peasant-lad, following the plough, and occupy- 

 ing himself in other farm-work. This regimen proved efficacious, and 

 he returned to the city in full and vigorous health. 



The oculist Wenzel, after an examination of his eyes, pronounced 

 the disease incurable. One eye was affected with the gutta serena, or 

 amaurosis, the same disease which caused the blindness of the poet 

 Milton, of which he says : 



" So thick a drop serene hath quenched their oibs." 



The blindness of the other was caused by cataract, a disease, in 

 our day, often successfully treated. The science of the oculist was, 

 then, far from the perfection which it has since reached, and the oper- 

 ation was considered too hazardous to be attempted. 



Happily, before the darkness closed down upon him, he had seen 

 and loved Marie-Aimee Lullin, daughter of one of the syndics of the 

 Swiss Republic. The childish love which had sprung up, at a dancing- 

 school, between the boy and girl, grew with years into a deep and 

 life-long devotion. In spite of the bitter opposition of her father, 

 which amounted to persecution, Mdlle. Lullin refused to give up her 

 lover; but Huber was filled with fears lest his growing infirmity 

 should alienate her. Under the influence of this dread he would hard- 

 ly acknowledge to himself the advance of the disease. As long as he 

 could at all perceive the light, he spoke and acted as if he saw. The 

 habit of expression thus formed left its impress upon his future style. 

 One cannot read the graphic descriptions of his experiments, as given 

 by himself, and fail to notice the frequent recurrence of such expres- 

 sions as " I have often seen" " I had the satisfaction of seeing'''' or 

 even, at times " Isaio with my own eyes.'''' There is a profound pathos 

 in this apparent obliviousness to his affliction, when we thus trace it 

 to its source. 



These fears, however, proved groundless, for Mdlle. Lullin, as soon 

 as she reached her majority, married him. During the forty years of 

 their married life, her tenderness and devotion toward her husband 

 were unfailing. She was his reader, his secretary, his observer; he 

 said of her, in his old age : " As long as she lived I was not sensible 

 of the misfortune of being blind." 



Besides his wife, Huber was eminently fortunate in his assistant,, 

 Francis Burneus. This man, who had entered the family in the ca- 

 pacity of a servant, his master soon discovered to be " born with the 

 talents of an observer. ... It is impossible," Huber again says, " to 

 form a just idea of the patience and skill with which Burneus has car- 

 ried out the experiments which I am about to describe .... he count- 

 ed pain and fatigue nothing compared with the great desire he felt %o> 



