352 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSUBE 



more entertainment from her husband's lively letters than on 

 any of his mountain tours. She in return was able to send him 

 an account of a dinner at La Boissiere, where the ' charmante 

 Minette' was staying with her father-in-law, Jean Robert 

 Tronchin. She had sat next Sir Samuel Romilly and found him 

 very agreeable : ' un melange du ton de Paris avec d'anciennes 

 phrases Genevoises, ce qui fait une conversation assez piquante. 

 Comme il a beaucoup vecu avec Diderot, avec Rousseau, il a des 

 anecdotes inteiessantes a raconter.' 



It was in the following winter that de Saussure issued his 

 strenuous reply to Deluc's attack on his hygrometer. There 

 appears to be no doubt that he was in the right, though some of his 

 contemporaries thought his tone too severe. He certainly did 

 not spare his opponent's feelings. He told Deluc that ' in his 

 Recherches sur les Modifications de V Atmosphere,' he had given ' none 

 but false or confused ideas of all that has to do with the theory of 

 evaporation.' He continued : ' What he calls his theory is nothing 

 but my own. I shall proceed to show on similar evidence that the 

 theories that are really M. Deluc's are worth no more than his 

 hygrometer. Let me not, however, be thought to be an enemy of 

 contradiction ; on the contrary, I welcome objections to my opinions 

 when they are proposed with the object of proving or discovering 

 the truth. But when one recognises an obvious intention to 

 disparage a work, when one finds a writer hunting for mistakes 

 for the sole pleasure of exposing them, playing on words in an 

 attempt to involve the author in a contradiction, attributing to 

 himself or others the author's merits, attacking him on generally 

 accepted opinions as if they were peculiar to him, presenting his 

 views in the most unfavourable light, and finally assuming the 

 tone of a schoolmaster who is correcting his pupil's theme and 

 distributing impartial blame and praise, one is equally disgusted 

 at the criticism and the commendation.' 1 



Three months later (April 1788) de Saussure 's claims to 

 membership of the Royal Society were at last admitted. That 

 body, which, despite the recommendation of Sir William Hamilton 

 twelve years before, had failed to accept de Saussure 's candidature, 

 now opened to the conqueror of Mont Blanc a gate not so narrow 



1 See for a further consideration of de Saussure's meteorological work, Dr. 

 Mill's comments in the Appendix. 



