Lesley.] 5iib ^jilay 19^ 



" On both sides of the level road which led from the brow of the moun- 

 tain to the house stood rows of trees, each dedicated to some guest and 

 marked with his name. More than a hundred names distinguished in 

 politics and science ma}' here be read, many of them now, alas, be- 

 neath a cro?s, to indicate their departure to a better world." 



Four times I have myself shared his hospitality, and can testify to the 

 charms of the place and of its master ; and I esteem it as a kind of patent 

 of nobility that my name stands among the rest. Here in 1859 Theodore 

 Parker found a retreat, the summer before he died in Italy (18G0), and his 

 double-headed pine stood, at some distance off the road, on the open slope 

 descending to the peat bogs which spread across the plateau between 

 Combe Varin and the village of Les Fonts. Desor followed Farker to 

 Italy, and was with him when he died. His attachment to him was based 

 (m their intercourse in Boston ; and whatever spiritual theories Desor 

 accepted were more or less formulated under the guiding influence of 

 this powerful thinker and good and generous soul. 



Desor was an active member of the Natural History Society of Neuf- 

 chatel.and publishedmany short memoirsin its transactions. He leaves his 

 remarkable museum of prehistoric antiquities to its care. 



He Avas a constant attendant at the meetings of the Swiss Congress of 

 Science, and would make long annual journeys to attend ' other similar 

 national associations ; especially of late years the annual meetings of the 

 Anthropologists, as at Copenhagen and at Stockholm, where he was 

 received with distinguished honor. 



In fact Desor maj- be considered the chief of modern geological arclife- 

 i'logists. After the first discovery of lake-dwellings in the winter of 

 1853-4 at Meilen on the shore of the lake of Zurich, and the commence- 

 ment of Keller's great museum there, all the lakes of Switzerland were 

 explored for similar discoveries. At least 200 villages were found by 

 Desor and Clement in the lakes of Neufchatel and Bienne ; bj-- Morlot 

 and Troyon in the lake of Geneva, and by other seekers in other lakes. 

 It Avas concluded that the Swiss lakes were unique in this respect, although 

 Herodotus was quoted as authority for the existence of lake-dwellers in his 

 day in a lake of Thrace. Desor however insisted upon the generality of 

 the phenomenon, and at length made a rendezvous with Von Siebold, of 

 Munich, to test the question in company with his own trained dredger. 

 The immediate result was their great discovery that the palace of the Ba- 

 varian King was built on an island in the Sternsee around the edge of 

 which could be seen the piles of the aboriginal lake-dwellers ; and in the 

 little museum of the palace they found a considerable number of needles, 

 knives, chisels, &c. which had been dredged from the foundation of the 

 palace. Upon this demonstration of the correctness of the large view 

 which Desor alone had taken of the subject the geologists and antiqua- 

 ries of Southern Germany and Austria set heartily to work and did not 

 fail to find prehistoric relics in all the lakes of that part of Europe. 



Desor subsequently (18G4) joined Escher von der Liuth the Swiss geol- 



