410 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



generation out of proportion to the value of his literary or scientific 

 remains, solid as these are. His celebrity during his lifetime and 

 for some years after his death in 1777 was European. According 

 to his son, nineteen separate lives and panegyrics of him appeared 

 before 1784. Archdeacon Coxe, in the standard English work on 

 Switzerland of the eighteenth century, devotes no less than 

 forty-five pages to ' Anecdotes of Haller.' 



Haller's father was a citizen of Berne and a lawyer. As a boy 

 Albrecht had delicate health but a precocious intellect. To this 

 he added prodigious power of work. Before he was ten he is said 

 to have produced an excellent piece of Greek prose ; at thirteen 

 he was studying the metaphysics of Descartes. At the same age 

 he employed his leisure in the dangerous pursuit of composing 

 a satirical Latin poem on his schoolmaster ! He also dabbled 

 deeply in verse, completing an epic of four thousand lines on the 

 Rise of the Swiss Republic. It is reported that in an alarm of fire 

 he seized the MSS. in his arms before he fled for safety. But six 

 years later, when twenty-four, he showed more judgment and a 

 rarer courage by committing to the flames his youthful effusions. 

 In after-life his memory and his facility in languages were alike 

 prodigious. He is said to have been able to run off without notes 

 the names of the Emperors of China. He wrote and conversed 

 in English, French, and Italian like a native, his Latin was 

 modelled on Tacitus, he had studied Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaic, 

 and could read almost any European tongue. This abnormal 

 activity of brain gave no satisfaction to worthy parents who 

 destined the fourth son in a large family for the Church. On his 

 father's death his relatives seem to have had no hesitation in 

 letting him go off at the early age of fifteen to study medicine at 

 Tubingen. Discontented with the lectures at that University, 

 the youth soon wandered on to Leyden, where, at the age of 

 nineteen, he took a doctor's degree. 



He next visited London, and was introduced by J. K. Scheuchzer, 

 a son of the author of Itinera Helvetica and the translator of 

 Kaempfer's work on Japan, to Sir Hans Sloane, the President of 

 the Royal Society, and to Dr. Pringle, who was soon to be his 

 successor. After spending a few weeks in this country he passed 

 on to Basle, whence in 1728 he made with his friend Johann Gesner 

 a fairly extensive botanical tour in the Alps, crossing the Gemmi 



