176 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



and Guillaume Antoine, inherited their father's political principles, 

 while adding to them scientific pursuits and a taste for climbing 

 which combined to incite the brothers to attempt in 1770 the first 

 ascent of the Buet. Two years later, owing either to his part in 

 the political troubles of the time, or more probably to financial 

 reverses, Jean Andr6 found it expedient to leave his native city, 

 and establish himself in England, where he married. Hia scientific 

 reputation as a meteorologist and inventor led to his being elected 

 a Fellow of the Royal Society, while scruples as to his radical 

 principles did not stand in the way of his accepting an appoint- 

 ment as Reader to Queen Charlotte. We catch a glimpse of the 

 quaint figure of the old republican in Miss Burney's Memoirs, 

 wandering about the Court at Windsor and subject to the gibes, 

 or practical jokes, of the dull royal dukes. Deluc's old age 

 was spent at or near Windsor. The last mention we have 

 of him is a report of his enjoying the descriptions of scenery in 

 Byron's ' Prisoner of Chillon,' and being reminded by them of 

 his own voyage round the lake with Rousseau more than sixty 

 years before. 1 He died in 1817 at the age of ninety, and his 

 tombstone may be found in the churchyard at Clewer. 



Jean Andre Deluc was a very voluminous author ; but it was as 

 a physical student and a skilful constructor of instruments that he 

 chiefly deserves respect. Meteorology was his special field, and 

 if he got the worst of his controversy with de Saussure on the 

 merits of their rival hygrometers, he was acknowledged by his 

 contemporaries to have contributed substantially to the progress 

 of the science. But his excursions into geology and cosmology 

 were less fortunate. The full title of his principal work may help 

 to explain this. It states that the treatise has been designed to 

 prove the divine mission of Moses. In short, Deluc may be said 

 to have had Genesis on the brain. In his cosmology he postulated 

 a convulsion in which the old continents had given place to oceans, 

 and the old sea-beds had become dry land. Thus the story of the 

 universal deluge was vindicated and the presence of marine fossils 

 on the high mountains accounted for. His views were in 1778 

 set forth in a work of six volumes, entitled, Lettres Physiques et 

 Morales sur les Montagues et sur I'Histoire de la Terre et de VHomme, 

 dedicated to the Queen of Great Britain. 



1 See p. 28. 



