SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF EDUARD SUKESS (1831-1914)2 
By Prerre TERMIER, 
Of the Paris Academy of Sciences. 
Eduard Suess, member and former president of the Imperial 
Academy of Sciences of Vienna, dean of the foreign associates of the 
Paris Academy of Sciences, peacefully and painlessly passed away 
on the night of the 25th of April, 1914, in Vienna, at the age of 83 
years. His death is mourned by the geologists and geographers 
of the whole world, for all looked upon him as a master, whose au- 
thority was supreme and whose intuition was well nigh infallible; 
and there is not one among them who has not in some way been his 
disciple, and who has not received from this man of genius with his 
clear ideas and his exact method the taste for profound problems and 
the enthusiasm indispensable to persevering researches. 
He was born on the 20th of August, 1831, in London, of a Jewish 
family, then recently come to England from Austria and who soon 
returned to that country. His father was a trader, a willmg wan- 
derer, like so many others of his race. Indeed, if one would under- 
stand Eduard Suess, this origm must never be forgotten. He was 
the man called to show and explain to us the face of the earth; to 
lead us, as by the hand, along all the shores and in the labyrinth of 
all the mountains of this planet; to make of us citizens of a humanity 
greater than all the nations and more enduring than all histories; 
this man was a splendid type of that old race, that nation elect, to 
whom universal supremacy was at one time promised, and whom we 
now see wandering without respite along sorrowful ways, moving 
across the continents and the oceans of the earth. 
The young Eduard studied first at Prague, then at Vienna, and 
very early attracted attention through his taste for the study of fossils, 
minerals, and rocks, a study which soon became an irresistible passion. 
In 1852, then only 20 years old, Eduard was appointed assistant at 
the Hofmineralenkabinett in Vienna, a kind of practical school of 
geology and mineralogy installed in the buildings of the Hofberg; 
his scientific career was begun. A first note on the Graptolites of 
Bohemia appeared in this same year, 1852. In 1854, he published a 
memoir on the Brachiopods of the Késsen beds, and in 1855, a study 
1 Translated by permission from Revue générale des Sciences pures et appliquées, Paris, June 15, 1914. 
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