834 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tiger, elephant, and many more will doubtless be known to our 

 descendants a century hence by their pictures in books and their 

 remains in the museums of the day. 



This great question of the economic value of animals is of 

 radical importance to every citizen. It should secure our 

 thoughtful attention, and be taught in our schools and colleges. 

 "We should demand from the Government absolute protection to 

 the fur seal ; our humane societies, which have accomplished so 

 much, should extend their good offices to the protection of song 

 birds, the wild game of our forests, and to all animal life. 



SKETCH OF LOUIS FIGUIER. 



BY IDA M. TARBELL. 



WHO in America, reading twenty years ago, does not remem- 

 ber The World before the Deluge ? It was translated from 

 French into English at a time when the great call in our schools 

 was for more science ; when the ministers in numbers of pulpits 

 were "reconciling Genesis with geology," and when boys and 

 girls of fifteen were observing strata and fossil plants and ani- 

 mals as they never had before. Its direct statements, its vivid 

 pictures, above all its exciting reconstructions of primitive 

 epochs a Silurian age whose principal inhabitant was a tran- 

 quil trilobite ; a carboniferous era rich in giant ferns and " horse- 

 tails " ; a Jurassic, whose terrible denizens, ichthyosaurus, plesio- 

 saurus, pterodactyl, haunted the dreams caused it to be read by 

 hundreds of young people. There are many men and women 

 in America who can trace their first interest in geology to that 

 work, or to some one of those in the series to which it be- 

 longed. 



The author of The World before the Deluge, M. Louis Figuier, 

 it was my fortune to meet frequently in the winter of 1893 and 

 '94 in his home in Paris, and the announcement of his death a 

 few months ago led me to believe that many American read- 

 ers might be interested in the recollections I have of our con- 

 versations and in the impressions his curious personality made 

 upon me. M. Figuier was one of those men whom the popular 

 fancy had wearied of and dropped, and who, 'unable to under- 

 stand why he was not as thoroughly in touch with his generation 

 as ever, insisted tenaciously on being heard. 



The modest apartment of M. Figuier, like the house, was of a 

 past generation. Its vestibule, whose walls were covered with 

 the light striped paper in vogue long ago, and hung with family 

 portraits in fading crayon and water colors, was furnished with 



