OBITUARY OF DR. PRA>^Z UNGER. 193 



means dispelled. In the beginning of February Unger had caught a 

 cold, and was advised to keep his bed a few days ; but he had already 

 arranged with his physician that he should get up on the day when he 

 was found dead, and therefore this slight illness could in no way be 

 accepted as an explanation, though it has been conjectured that in an 

 attempt to leave his bed during the night, he hurt himself by a fall on 

 the floor, and died from the effects of some spasms, after succeeding in 

 regaining his bed. But this conjecture has found slight acceptance. 

 It has been stated that no valuables were missing in his death -room, — 

 Unger being a man living in considerable affluence, — but his papers had 

 been overhauled ; and this fact, or supposed fact, was at once con- 

 nected in the popular mind with the position the deceased had taken 

 up towards the so-called Ultramontane party in Austria. Though 

 brought up by clerical tutors, Unger had so far emancipated himself 

 from the trammels of his early education, that about the year 1856, 

 when the Concordat was attempted to be enforced in Austria with all 

 the vigour the law allowed, he incurred the serious displeasure of the 

 Ultramontanes by the freedom with which he had handled certain scien- 

 tific subjects in his "Botanical Letters." He was openly denounced 

 and preached against from the pulpit as a man who corrupted the 

 youth of the empire by false teaching ; and attempts were even made 

 to deprive him of his professorship at the University of Vienna, which 

 he' then occupied. The strongest possible pressure was brought to 

 bear upon the Government to prohibit one of the Vienna theatres put- 

 ting his far-famed ' Ideal Views of Primitive Nature ' (republished by 

 Hardvvicke in this country) upon the stage ; and it was only by the 

 direct intervention of a personage of the highest rank that this novel 

 mode of popularizing the results of abstruse science was finally per- 

 mitted. A man of Unger's stamp, enjoying a world-wide reputation 

 of the soundest kind, a keen observer and a bold speculator, a 

 man of genius, endowed at once with the caution of a Robert Brown 

 and the daring of a Huxley, — such a man was certainly a formidable 

 antagonist, who would speak out, regardless of all consequences, and 

 who naturally had as many ardent admirers as lie had d(;adlY haters. 

 When at the end of last year he delivered his annual address, as Pre- 

 sident of the Natural History Society at Graz, he boldly advocated 

 freedom of inquiry on all subjects which can possibly interest man 

 individually or collectively. This doctrine gave great offence to some 



