vi LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



de Saussure's career, scientific, Alpine, political, and social. His 

 efforts have been singularly successful. I have had brought under 

 my eyes a mass of private correspondence, including letters between 

 de Saussure and his scientific contemporaries, letters from and to 

 his wife and nearest relations, and from his numerous friends in 

 England and Paris. Mr. Montagnier has further had access to de 

 Saussure's carefully kept journal of his Grand Tour of France, 

 Holland, and England, as well as to the rough notebooks of many 

 of his Alpine excursions, no account of which was included in the 

 published Voyages. All this for the most part new material has 

 been at my disposal. I have in addition made use, wherever pos- 

 sible, of the short biographical notices or eulogies of de Saussure 

 contributed by his contemporaries Senebier, Cuvier, de Candolle, 

 and more recently by Forbes, Wolf, Sainte-Beuve, Sayous, Topffer, 

 Favre, and Naville. Further, in order to realise to some extent 

 the background against which de Saussure's figure must be set, 

 I have turned over the pages of many local tracts and journals 

 of the latter half of the eighteenth century and of some of the 

 personal memoirs that throw light on the political and social 

 state of Geneva during the most eventful period in its history : 

 a period when not only Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bonnet, but 

 visitors such as Madame d'Epinay and Grimm, Madame de Stael 

 and Madame Necker, made it a centre of intellectual thought and 

 activity. On the events of the succeeding years, when the internal 

 quarrels of the Genevese reproduced on a small scale the miseries 

 and crimes of the French Revolution, and finally wrecked their 

 ancient Republic, several recently published volumes have thrown 

 fresh light. They help to prove that throughout those political 

 troubles de Saussure played a strenuous and persevering part 

 a part that has not as yet been adequately recognised by local 

 historians. I have done my best to bring out the patriotic 

 aims of his action, as it presents itself when closely studied 

 in contemporary memoirs and documents from a point of 

 view free from all party bias. I have also given some 

 space to his energetic and persistent attitude as an educational 

 reformer, a capacity in which he showed a breadth of outlook 

 in advance of his time, and even, perhaps, of our own. In 

 short, I have tried to deal with de Saussure's lif e as a whole ; 

 to present him not only in the two capacities in which his fame is 



