REVIEWS 135 



The publication of this work, the French edition of Das Antlitz der Erde, 

 has been completed in mourning. The epilogue which I had been asked to 

 write, and which formerly in happy years I had dreamt to offer to the old 

 master as a tribute of admiration, affection and gratitude, will, alas, be neither 

 read nor heard by him ; and in penning these lines I can put into them neither 

 the enthusiasm nor the joy of my dream, because the hour is sad and too much 

 blood and too many tears have flowed upon the terrible way where humanity 

 drags along. 



Eduard Suess died at Vienna during the night of the 25-26 April, 1914; 

 passed away peacefully, without suffering, painlessly, without having any 

 presentiment of those disasters which were about to descend upon Europe. 

 Many will agree with me in thinking that he did well to die in the care-free 

 spring, the forerunner of a summer of massacres. Altogether good, generous, 

 devoted to others, evidently made for sweetness and tenderness, he would 

 have suffered atrociously to see what we have seen, to see entire peoples seized 

 with madness, the face of the earth ravaged and blood-soaked, the hate of 

 races which he believed abolished exasperated even so as to desire extermina- 

 tion; to see this impassable and indestructible barrier erected across Europe 

 to separate the friends of yesterday, those who collaborated in the works of 

 peace, of hfe, of brotherhood; those who would have forgotten their ancient 

 frontiers .... and who now are enemies for how long a time — Great God! 

 He has known nothing of these things, he has appeared to fall asleep in the 

 quiet of his home in the heart of a city prosperous and happy, in the silence of 

 the peaceful night, at the end of April, in this time of the year, .... Yes, 

 in truth, the hour was favorable for men to depart and enter quietly into 

 dissolution : he has done well to die. 



It would be idle to deny that Suess has advanced hypotheses to which 

 he adhered with the greatest tenacity, but which have not stood the 

 test of time, such, for example, as his idea of the horst. In a biographical 

 note published in this journal shortly after the death of Suess the re- 

 viewer wrote of the Antlitz: 



The honest critic must frankly admit that, great as is this masterpiece of 

 geological generalization, it suffers from two rather serious defects. Its author 

 was almost too clever as advocate and parliamentarian and was, moreover, 

 not without bias. With a manner altogether masterful, he could dismiss as 

 it were with a wave of the hand important evidence which was unfavorable to 

 maintenance of his thesis and, with equal ability, could magnify the weight of 

 much less valuable or unimportant observations. Again, his great work suffers 

 from a bewildering detail and an enumeration of localities too small to appear 

 upon maps outside the original articles but upon which the conclusions are 

 absolutely dependent, so that the reader is prevented from following the 

 author's argument. 



