LIFE OF EDUARD SUESS—TERMIER. 711 
political liberty. It was in 1863, less than a year after the publica- 
tion of ‘‘Der Boden der Stadt Wien,” that he entered the municipal 
council of Vienna where he remained for 10 consecutive years. Resign- 
ing in 1873, he returned to it in 1882, not to leave the council defi- 
nitely until 1886. In 1873, he had been elected deputy; and for 
many years he was in the Austrian Chamber, one of the orators of the 
left, one of the most resolute adversaries of the ultramontaine party, 
one of the leaders of the liberal party, the Fortschrittspartei. 
It is difficult to believe to-day that the man who in 1875 wrote 
‘Die Entstehung der Alpen,” and from 1878 to 1883, the first volume 
of ‘‘Das Antlitz der Erde’’—those books whose principal character- 
istic is their calmness—is the same man who simultaneously became 
excited in parliamentary contests and startled his adversaries by the 
vivacity of his attacks and his quick repartee. The identity of the 
great scholar and the man of politics reappears, however, in the 
speeches of the latter. At all times—say those who have heard him 
in the chamber—his eloquence aroused in him a sort of poesy, without 
analogy or precedent, a poesy in which are seen to pass in review the 
earth and its inhabitants, nm which are heard chords of universal 
harmony. Thus, for example, he compared the abrupt dawn of 
glory and influence of the old English universities to the sudden 
appearance in the sky at a point until then hidden from the con- 
stellated firmament, of a new star, such as Mira Coeli, whose light, 
although unsuspected, existed, nevertheless, for centuries, and pro- 
ceeded toward our gaze in fathomless space. Sometimes, wishing to 
speak of the train of great thoughts and worthy ideas which travel 
from nation to nation bettermg mankind everywhere, he described to 
the astonished and mute assembly that isolated reef at the extreme 
tip of South America, where navigators have placed a cask, sheltered 
by no pavilion, and belonging to no one. Each ship that passes sends 
off toward this desolate rock a little boat and the sailors who climb 
its sides place in the cask letters addressed to their native lands, and 
from it take the letters which they find there bearmg the address of 
the countries toward which they are bound. The sailors’ letters thus 
wander about from port to port without being directed by anyone 
and they proceed slowly but surely toward their distant goal. Full 
of such figures, this manner of speech belongs to Eduard Suess; it is 
his style; and never was a style more personal than his. 
In the memory of the Viennese the name of Eduard Suess will ever 
remain connected with two great municipal works: The imtroduction 
of drinking water and the regulation of the flow of the Danube. 
They still say in Vienna, ‘‘Suess’s water,’ when to a stranger they 
praise the purity and freshness of the water used in that great city, 
and which since 1873 has replaced the unwholesome water of the 
Danube and the lakes. That is justice to Suess, for it was he who 
