NA TURE 



[May 4, 1905 



now largely rests. As far back as 1863 he published 

 a brief statement of the results to which his inquiries 

 had led him as to the former connection of northern 

 Africa with southern Europe. In 1855 he married the 

 daughter of Dr. Strauss, a distinguished physician in 

 Prague, and then entered on a life of great domestic 

 happiness, which largely contributed to the success of 

 a strenuous career wherein science and politics came to 

 be strangely blended. 



From his youthful days, when he described the Carls- 

 bad springs, he had been interested in underground 

 waters, and among the inquiries which he pursued 

 while attached to the museum was one that embraced 

 the relations of the soil and water supply of Vienna to 

 the life of its inhabitants. In 1862 he published a 

 small volume on this subject,' in which he gave a 

 comprehensive account of the economic geology of the 

 district. At that time the city was suffering from an 

 impure water supply and consequent typhoid fever. 

 The luminous essay of the young professor at once 

 attracted attention. He was the same year elected 

 into the town council, that he might give the benefit 

 of his advice in the steps to be taken towards the 

 attainment of better sanitary arrangements. He 

 boldly advocated a scheme for bringing the abundant 

 pure water of the Alps into Vienna by means of an 

 aqueduct no kilometres in length. This project, 

 eventually adopted, was brought to a successful termin- 

 ation in 1873. So grateful were his fellow-citizens 

 for .the signal service thus conferred on them that they 

 bestowed on him their highest civic distinction by elect- 

 ing him an honorary burgess. By this time he had 

 made his mark in the town council as one of its most 

 useful and able members, so that it was not surprising 

 that he should have been chosen as one of the parlia- 

 mentary representatives. For more than thirty years 

 he sat in the Austrian Parliament as a powerful leader 

 of the Liberal party, only retiring in 1896, when 

 advancing age made the strain of the two-fold life as 

 a politician and man of science too great to be longer 

 borne. When the political history of the country 

 during the last half of the nineteenth century comes 

 to be written, a prominent place in it will be given 

 to Eduard Suess. 



But it is his scientific work that has to be chiefly 

 dwelt upon here. As an enthusiastic and able teacher 

 he has exerted a notable influence on the successive 

 generations of students at the university, until after 

 forty-four years he resigned his professorship in the 

 summer of 1901. Throughout his career he has shown 

 a keen interest in those branches of geology which 

 more especially deal with the evolution of the earth's 

 surface features. The problems of mountain-building 

 were suggested to him by his excursions among the 

 eastern Alps, and in 1875 his views were so far matured 

 that he published a little volume entitled " Die 

 Entstehung der Alpen." This work contains the germ 

 of those later contributions to science which have placed 



1 "Der Eoden der Stadt Wien nach seiner BildungsweUe, Beschaafenheit, 

 yfid seinen Beziehungen zum Burgerlichen Leben." (Vienna, 1S62.) 



him on so conspicuous an eminence among the 

 geologists of the day. It sketches the general prin- 

 ciples of mountain-architecture, especially revealed by 

 a study of the Alpine chain. But he did not confine 

 his view to the particular area with which he was him- 

 self personally familiar. Already his eye looked out 

 on the wider effects of the unequal contraction of the 

 terrestrial crust, and swept across the European con- 

 tinent eastwards into Asia, and westwards across the 

 Atlantic into America. He still held the general belief 

 in the upheaval and depression of continental areas, 

 and dwelt on the evidence of these movements in 

 Scandinavia, which he has since rejected with much 

 elaboration of argument. To thoughtful students of 

 the science this treatise, in its firm hold of detail com- 

 bined with singularly vivid powers of generalisation, 

 was full of suggestiveness. But the interest and im- 

 portance of its subject did not obtain general recog- ; 

 nition until it was followed ten years afterwards (1885) i 

 by the first volume of the great " Antlitz der Erde " I 

 — the work which has chiefly given Suess his place 

 among his contemporaries, and by which his name will 

 be handed down to future time. 



In its striking arrangement of subjects, in its 

 masterly grouping of details which, notwithstanding 

 their almost bewildering multiplicity, are all linked 

 with each other in leading to broad and impressive con- 

 clusions, and in the measured cadence of its finer 

 passages, the " Antlitz " may be regarded as a noble 

 philosophical poem in which the story of the continents 

 and the oceans is told by a seer gifted with rare powers 

 of insight into the past. The order of treatment is 

 not that of a systematic text-book. On the contrary^ 

 the casual reader who looks over the contents of the 

 chapters might suppose them to consist of a series of 

 desultory essays with no very clear sequence of thought. 

 Yet a more leisurely study soon shows him how closely 

 interwoven is the texture of the whole composition. 

 He is astonished at the almost incredible range of 

 literature which the author must have consulted, and 

 he finds himself borne onward page after page by the 

 luminous array of facts and the brilliant conclusions- 

 drawn from them. From the ancient traditions of the 

 Deluge he is led through other human records, and 

 made to see by what combination of physical con- 

 ditions changes are worked on the surface of the earth. 

 Upheaval and subsidence, volcanic eruptions, the 

 elevation of mountain-chains, the depression of sea- 

 basins, the structure and disposition of continents, the 

 formation and boundaries of the different oceans in 

 the past as well as at the present day, the successive 

 plications that in the course of geological time have 

 produced the land areas and mountain-ranges of the 

 globe — in short, the gradual evolution of the existing 

 topography of the surface of the globe — this vast theme 

 is here treated with a fulness of knowledge and a 

 breadth of view which are to be found in no other 

 author. 



The work at once commanded attention among the 

 geologists of every country, and the influence of its 



NO. 1853, VOL. 72] 



