694 MEMOIR OP GUYOT. 



Professor Guyot's father, David Pierre, esteemed for Lis "prompt 

 iutelligeiice and perfict integrity," married, in 179G, Mademoiselle 

 Constance Favarger, of Neucbatel, '-a lady of great personal beauty 

 and rare nobility of character." Arnold Henri, one of twelve children, 

 was born at Boudevilliers on the 2Sth of Sejjtember, 1807, and was 

 Damed after the Swiss patriot of the fourteenth century, Arnold von 

 Winkelried. About 1818 the family moved to Ilauterive, 3 miles from 

 Neuchatel, where his father died the following year. From the house 

 at Hauterive joung Guyot had before him, to the sontheastwaid, the 

 whole chain of the Alps from Mt. Blanc toTitlis; and his sensitive natnre 

 must have drawn inspiration from the glorious view — the same deep 

 draughts that he attributed to young Agassiz in his academic memoir 

 of his friend, with reference to the same circumstance — the snowy Bern- 

 ese Oberland, the Jungfrau, the Schreckhorn, the Finsteraarhorn, the 

 Eigers, and other summits to Mt. Blanc, "looming up before iiis eyes 

 in the view from his house." Such views are calculated to make phys- 

 ical geographers and geologists of active minds. Guyot early found 

 pleasure in the collection of insects and plants, and evinced in this and 

 other ways the impress that nature was making upon him. 



Previous to the year 1818, and for a w^hile after, Guyot was at school 

 at La Chaux-de-Fonds, a noted village " at the foot of a narrow and 

 savage gorge of the Jura," 3,070 feet above the sea. In 1821, then 

 fourteen years of age, he entered the College of Neucbatel, where he 

 was a classmate of Leo Lesquereux, the botanist. " Guyot and I," says 

 Lesquereux, " were, for some years, brothers in study, working in com- 

 mon and often spending our vacations together, either at Guyot's home, 

 at Hauterive, or with my parents at Fleurier; and I owe much in life 

 to the good influences of this friendship." Bis studies were classical, 

 Latin, Greek, and philosophy, arranged for preparing a boy for the 

 profession of the law, medicine, or theology, with almost nothing to 

 foster his love of nature. 



In 1825, then eighteen, he left home to complete his education in 

 Germany. After spending three months at Metziugen, near Stuttgart, 

 in the study of the German language, he went to Carlsruhe, where he 

 became an inmate of the family of Mr. Brauii, a man of wealth and sci- 

 entific tastes, the father of the distinguished botanist and philosopher, 

 Alexander Braun, the discoverer of phyllotaxis — terms of intimacy 

 with the family on the part of several of his relatives having been of 

 long standing. The family comprised also a younger son and two 

 daughters. Agassiz was then a student at Heidelberg along with 

 young Alexander Braun and Carl Schimper, but he spent his summer 

 vacations at the Carlsruhe mansion. A vacation soon came. "The 

 arrival of the eldest son of the house," says Guyot, "already distin- 

 guished by scientific publications, with his three university friends — 

 Agassiz, Schimper, the gifted co-laborer of Braun in the discovery of 

 phyllotaxis, and Imhofif, of Bale, the future author of one of the best 



