He) 
the privilege of his friendship and having heard from his 
own lips many of the incidents of his life, I am able to 
give here a few personal reminiscences which may be of 
general interest at the present time, without at present 
attempting to offer any summary or review of the scien- 
tific work of his life. It is much to be desired that his 
own notices of his life should be published. His early 
wandering years were especially eventful, and their history 
NATURE 
is intimately bound up with that of the science which he | 
cultivated with so much ardour. 
Ami Boué was born, so far as I can make out, on 
March 16, 1794, so that he had reached the eighty-eighth 
year of his age. He was descended of an old French 
family, and could trace his pedigree back for sone four 
centuries, In the time of Louis XIV., when so large a 
part of the Protestant population fled on the Revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes, his ancestor escaped from Bor- 
deaux ina barrel. The family went first to Amsterdam, 
and finally settled at Hamburg. His mother’s family 
belonged to an Alsatian stock, by name Roth-Hut, which, 
when they came to Geneva, was changed into Chapeau- 
rouge. She was the daughter of a rich merchant who 
had established himself at Hamburg, but she was sent at 
an early age to her relatives in Geneva. Hence French 
became her early, and to the end of life her natural, 
language, for though she returned to Hamburg and 
married there, she never acquired fluency in German, 
and French was the language in which she always 
talked to her children. Thus, though born in Ham- 
burgh, Boué spoke and wrote French, and not German, 
as the language of his boyhood. Both his father and 
mother appear to have died when he was still very 
young. He was accordingly sent to the care of his uncles 
in Geneva to be educated. It was intended that he 
should enter the mercantile life, in which most of his 
relatives were engaged. But at that time the French 
were menacing Hamburg, and the state of Europe was 
so unquiet that his guardians, deeming him safer in 
Geneva, kept him there studying jurisprudence. His 
tastes were already, however, strongly turned towards 
natural science, and he threw himself heartily into the 
pursuit of mineralogy and botany. He was accordingly 
allowed to prosecute these studies, in which he made 
considerable progress. The political horizon continu- 
ing still ominously dark, Boué’s future was somewhat 
uncertain. There was family property enough in Ham- 
burg to secure a small competence for himself and his 
brothers ; but it consisted of property and stock which 
might be destroyed by the French, as had happened 
already to one of his uncles. Sohis guardians determined 
that he ought to have some profession to fall back upon in 
case of the destruction of the Hamburg property. He 
chose medicine as the career that promised most facilities 
for prosecuting natural history studies. Britain offering 
at that time the only safe retreat for him, he was sent 
to the medical school of Edinburgh University. As he 
used to say himself, ‘I really went to Scotland to escape 
from Napoleon.’’ Coming with good introductions from 
Prevost of Geneva and others to Dugald Stewart and 
other eminent men, he found a welcome in the most cul- 
tivated society of Edinburgh. For three months he em- 
ployed himself principally in acquiring English, which 
he eventually mastered sufficiently to be able to read it 
fluently, and with less success to speak and write it. To 
the end of his long life he was glad of every opportunity 
of using his knowledge of English. His letters tome were 
always in English, closely written, without spectacles, in an 
almost microscopic handwriting, and not seldom sealed 
with a thistle and “ Dinna forget,” which he cherished as 
one of the souvenirs of his student days in Scotland. He 
studied chemistry under Hope, and took voluminous notes 
in French, which he had carefully preserved. He knew 
more botany, he used to say, than his professor, and pro- 
fited nothing by that class. But the natural history class 
[Dec. 1, 1881 
under Jameson greatly stimulated his mineralogical and 
geological zeal. In the fortnight between the winter and 
summer sessions he would always rush off for an excursion 
into some part of the country with hammer, bag, or vascu- 
lum. The long autumn vacation, too, was put to a similar 
use. In this way he made himself personally familiar 
with much of the Scottish Highlands, including Mull and 
Arran. He extended his rambles into the basaltic tracts 
of the north of Ireland, and visited also the Lake Dis- 
trict and part of Derbyshire. Besides receiving the 
friendly assistance of his teacher, Jameson, he was inti- 
mate with Playfair, and accompanied MacCulloch in his 
yacht round Arran. 
Meanwhile events of worldwid2 importance and of the 
utmost interest to Boué had been rapidly passing on the 
Continent. The final disaster at Waterloo, by shattering 
Napoleon’s power, had freed Boué’s Hamburg property 
from all risk of attack, and left him at liberty regarding 
his future career. He resolved to complete his medical 
education, and accordingly took his degree at Edinburgh 
in 1816. During the course of his medical work he had 
made many researches and experiments with the view of 
offering as his graduation thesis a treatise, De Urina. 
But finding he could not afford to publish so voluminous 
a mass of materials as he had collected, he chose another 
subject to which he had likewise given much attention— 
the causes of the present geographical distribution of 
plants. He was at that time much impressed by the 
writings of Humboldt on kindred topics, and in the 
course of his rambles over Scotland he had been in the 
habit of noting carefully the relations between the flora 
of each district and its geological structure. Accordingly 
he duly presented to the Senatus a Latin thesis, “De 
Methodo Floram regionis cujusdam conducendi, exem- 
plis e flora Scotica &c., ductis, illustrata.’”’ It was cha- 
racteristically and gratefully dedicated to his maternal 
uncles and guardians. : 
Having graduated as a doctor of medicine at Edin- 
burgh, he left Scotland immediately thereafter, and went 
to Paris to prosecute his studies in physics and chemistry. 
While thus engaged he brought together the large collec- 
tion of notes he had made in Scottish geology, and elabo- 
rated them into his well-known “Essai Géologique sur 
VEcosse” a work which will always rank as one of the 
early classics of the science. Unfortunately for the book 
he left Paris on his travels before it had passed through 
the press. He placed the revision of the proofs in the 
hands of a friend, and hence many errors crept both into 
the text and the plates. 
Being now free to move about as he chose, he devoted 
himself with all the ardour of his enthusiastic nature to 
the prosecution of geology. He personally visite1 most of 
the more interesting tracts of France and Central Europe, 
but finally devoted himself to the eastern regions, as being 
those about which least was known, At the age of thirty- 
two he married a lady six years younger than himself, 
who accompanied him in many of his journeys, and who 
now survives him. The best evidence of his constant 
industry is furnished by the list of papers and memoirs, 
some 200 in number, which during his long life he pub- 
lished in the scientific journals of Europe. Some of his 
best work was done in Turkey, of which country indeed 
he was the first great geological explorer. The volumes 
in which he embodied the results of his researches there 
show at once his skill as an observer and the quiet in- 
domitable courage with which he must have faced every 
kind of privation and even danger. On one occasion, as 
he told me, he was poisoned by his servant—a nobleman, 
who leaving him for dead, made off with the carriage and 
everything belonging to the poor traveller except his 
watch, which, being only of silver, was not considered 
worth stealing. ; 
After some years spent in field-work he published at 
Paris (1835) his excellent “ Guide du Géologue-Voyageur,’ 
