A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



O/ Nature trusts the 



" To the solid ground 

 niind which builds for a 



-WOKDSWORTII. 



SCIENTIFIC WORTHIES. 

 XXXV. — Eduard Suess. 



A MOXG the living leaders of geology none is. more 

 '^ widelv known and more highl}' honoured than 

 Eduard .Suess. The amount and value of his original 

 contributions to science, the broad, philosophic grasp 

 he has displayed of every department of research on 

 which he has entered, the vivid, imaginative insight 

 which has enabled him to marshal a multiplicity of 

 scattered facts into connected order and sequence, the 

 unwearied industry with which he has made himself 

 acquainted with the geological literature of almost 

 every country on. the face of the globe, and the noble 

 march of the literary style in which he has clothed not 

 a little of his reasoning and speculation, have com- 

 bined to give him a place apart, like that of one of 

 the great masters in the heroic age of geology. Full 

 of years and honours, and president of the Academy of 

 .Sciences, he still moves as the centre of the scientific 

 life of \'ienna, still enriches the world with his im- 

 l^rcssive pictures of the structure and history of the 

 earth, and still manifests an ardent interest and 

 enthusiasm in all that concerns the advancement of 

 natural knowledge. 



But for a wave of change in the world of commerce 

 we might have claimed Suess as an Englishman, and 

 his achieveiii^nts might have added their lustre to the 

 scientific fame of this country instead of Austria, for 

 he was born in London and spent here the earliest 

 years of his childhood. His fr,ther, who was a native 

 of Saxony, had settled here as a German merchant, 

 importing wool from Bohemia, and it was during the 

 residence of the familv in London that the eldest son 

 and future geologist was born on August 20, 1S31. 

 When wool began to arrive in abundance from the vast 

 sheep-runs of the Australian colonies, the trade in the 

 NO. 1853, VOL. 72] 



Bohemian product declined mi much that at last, in 

 November, 1834, the Suess family left England for 

 Prague. The father in 1S45 became a partner in a 

 great industrial establishment in Vienna, and that city 

 was thenceforth the family home. It had been at first 

 intended that the son should enter the same business, 

 and accordingly at the end of the usual school train- 

 ing he was placed in the polytechnic school. But it 

 soon became apparent that his natural bent did not 

 lie in the commercial direction, but wholly towards 

 natural history studies. As early as the year 1850, 

 when he was only nineteen years of age, he ventured 

 upon his first publication — a short sketch of the geology 

 of Carlsbad and its mineral waters, specially prepared 

 for the use of foreigners. So completely had his tastes 

 now decided his future life that in the following 

 year he w'as appointed an assistant in the Imperial 

 Museum of Vienna, and thus made his formal entry 

 into the official ranks of science. From that day until 

 now the long intervening half-century, though un- 

 eventful in personal experiences, has been with him 

 a time of ceaseless industry and fruitful research. A 

 few more specially notable epochs in his career may 

 here be noticed. 



In the vast paljeontological collections of the Vienna 

 Museum Suess found a wide domain for the exercise 

 of his powers of observation and comparison. He at 

 first specially devoted himself to the study of the 

 brachiopods of the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic formations, 

 and for some ten years continued to publish the results 

 of his researches among these interesting and im- 

 portant fossils, but with incursions into other depart- 

 ments of the animal kingdom, which displayed a 

 general enthusiasm for biological inquiry from the geo- 

 logical point of view. His zeal and ability were soon 

 recognised bv his being appointed in 1857, at the age 

 of twentv-six, professor in the university. In 1862 he 

 relinquished his post in the museum and devoted him- 

 self thenceforth to the duties of his chair. It was in this 

 early part o; his life that he entered upon those studies 

 in palseogeography on which his scientific renown 



