YOUTH AND EARLY TRAVELS 85 



relations i with the celebrated naturalist, Spallanzani, who was 

 prosecuting at Pa via his researches into the animalcules of infusoria 

 and their modes of reproduction, and at a later date de Saussure 

 made discoveries that led Spallanzani to congratulate Bonnet on 

 there being another great naturalist in the world. 



De Saussure was shortly to be occupied with a domestic and 

 less abstruse problem. His first child, a daughter, was born in 

 1766, and christened Albertine Andrienne. 2 The young husband 

 writes to inform Haller that he has become a father. 



' You will easily understand, sensible as you are, monsieur, that 

 this event has distracted me somewhat from my ordinary occupations. 

 My distraction has been increased owing to my reading and observa- 

 tions having revealed to me a prodigious number of faults in the 

 ordinary way of treating and dressing new-born infants, and I have 

 been obliged to carry out myself, or at least to have carried out in my 

 presence, all that was not according to custom ! ' 



A man must be bold indeed to have the courage of his opinions 

 in such circumstances, and de Saussure had to face a grandmother- 

 in-law ! This happy event was not the only interruption in his 

 studies about this time. In October his father-in-law, M. Boissier, 

 was found drowned in the Rhone . The evidence given at the inquest 

 by Dr. Turton, a friend of the family, and afterwards physician to 

 George in., who was at Geneva at the time, showed that he had 

 committed suicide in an access of the acute melancholia for which, 

 writing from Paris only two days before M. Boissier's death, Dr. 

 Tronchin had advised change of scene as indispensable. The 

 young couple were, no doubt, living with him at the time, in the 

 great townhouse in the Rue de la Cite. De Saussure, writing to 

 Haller, describes the calamity with much feeling : 



' I have had the misfortune to lose my father-in-law by a violent 

 death while still in the prime of his life. I was deeply attached to him ; 

 he was a man of intelligence, a wise counsellor, a good friend and 

 father and citizen, who made the happiness of his family, who had 



1 De Saussure visited Spallanzani at Pa via in 1770. (See post.) 



2 By her marriage to Jacques Necker, a nephew of the statesman and a 

 cousin of Madame de Stael, she became known in after life as Madame Necker-de 

 Saussure. She inherited her father's tastes, assisted him at times by working 

 out his observations, and followed in his footsteps in composing the work on 

 education by which she is known to posterity. (See chap, xv.) 



