414 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



was here that in 1758, while residing at the Chateau of Roche, 

 near Villeneuve, a modest country-house that now serves as the 

 vicarage, he made acquaintance with de Saussure and his mother, 

 through an introduction from Bonnet, his friendship for whom 

 dated from earlier meetings at Lausanne. A little later, in 1766-7, 

 he was elected assessor on the Secret Commission that had to 

 deal with the disorders at Geneva, in which Berne was concerned 

 as one of the three mediating Powers. 1 But though kings were 

 again begging him to accept chancellorships of universities, local 

 difficulties prevailed, and he was repeatedly unlucky in the lottery 

 which determined the elections to the Supreme Council. In the 

 end, however, his fellow-townsmen, seriously alarmed at the 

 temptations offered by London and Berlin, created for Haller a 

 special appointment with a salary of fourteen hundred francs a 

 year. ' This small sum,' Haller says, ' was sufficient, coupled with 

 his other emoluments and the state of his health, to make him 

 content to spend the remainder of his life in his own country.' 2 



At Berne he was fully occupied by his public duties and 

 scientific pursuits. He wrote many tracts on surgical and medical 

 topics ; he revised his poems. Among the mountains he naturally 

 took up with renewed zest his botanical studies. His great work 

 in three folio volumes, provided with many admirably engraved 

 illustrations, Historia stirpium Helvetiae indigenarum inchoata, 

 was dedicated in the most effusive terms to his patron, George m. 

 The preface includes a summary of his own excursions and of those 

 of the collectors who travelled for him, and is a valuable piece of 

 autobiography. Haller tells us that his disposition was all towards 

 a sedentary life, to the study of medicine and books ; but that, 

 recognising that his health, never very robust, would suffer, he 

 looked about for some pursuit that might serve as a stimulant and 

 a remedy for his lack of physical energy. He could think of 

 nothing better than botanical studies ; these he hoped might 

 compel him to walking exercise. At the start he tells us, ' rupes 

 et horrida saepe praecipitia perreptavi.' ' I often scrambled over 

 rocks and horrid precipices ; for at that date I could climb the 

 most difficult rocks without any fear of giddiness.' But his Alpine 



1 See chapter xii. 



* Condorcet points out that Haller, Jussieu, Linnaeus, Voltaire, and Rousseau 

 all died within eight months of each other. 



