6 Prof. Cotta’s Eulogy on Von Buch. 
labors is not the least part of their merit. In so simple and clear 
a style can no one write who is not perfectly master of his sub- 
ject. Somewhat characteristic of him is it also, that he always 
shunned all references in the text, and with right, for they never 
belong to the embellishments of a book. They are generally 
only a consequence of the fact that the author is not able to spin 
out into one thread all that he would say, or that he has hung 
them on to prove his erudition, or they are entirely superfluous 
and do not belong to the subject. As they are impossible in the 
flowing speech, they should also be avoided as far as possible 
in Written productions. 
During the period of his long scientific career, occurred the 
discovery of the true meaning and the geological worth of or- 
ganic remains; which till then had been looked upon as unes- 
sential things and had been but little noticed. Scarcely was 
cameration and at the same time pointed out the peculiar laws 0 
their development, which for primeval zoology and for geology 
has become alike equally important. 
e next turned his attention—ever seizing first of all upon 
what was at the time most important—to the genera Terebratula, 
Spirifer, and Productus, which, as paleontological remains, are 
of life of those remarkable animals. In a similar manner he later 
elucidated the Cystidea—a remarkable division of the Radiata— 
while earlier he had already described, in a splendid work. the 
fossils collected in America by Alexander von Humboldt and Ch. 
egenhard, in these cases animating by his genius those long 
extinct forms of a primeval world as if they were still sporting © 
amid the living. 
The study of Organic Remains, which has given to geology an 
entirely new direction, also led him, who first introduced the con- 
ception of characteristic fossils for formations, to the more precise 
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