8i4 WILLIAM HERBERT HOBBS 



in touch with him. To know him was to love him. for his many 

 noble traits of mind and heart. 



The great success of the Antlitz der Erde, the four massive 

 volumes of which have been translated into both French and 

 EngHsh/ is to be ascribed to a wonderful command of the entire 

 field, due to a knowledge of many languages, to the accessibility 

 and assiduous use of vast storehouses of geological literature, and 

 to a quite remarkable grasp upon this full material with a power 

 to generalize. Walking through the library of the Hof museum and 

 passing the Diener, or servant assistant, whose duty it had been 

 for twenty years to carry books from the library to his study, 

 Professor Suess remarked to the writer: "When the Antlitz had 

 appeared the Diener showed amazement that it was not larger, and 

 said to me, 'Is that all you got out of the books I brought you ?' " 



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

 masterpiece of geological generahzation, it suffers from two rather 

 serious defects. Its author was almost too clever as advocate and 

 parHamentarian 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 abihty, 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. This latter defect Professor Suess fully real- 

 ized and he would have welcomed the preparation of a special atlas 

 which should supplement his work. To offset this serious defect 

 in overabundance of detail, which tended to make his volumes dry 

 and difl&cult to read, they were written in a style so full of imagery 

 and of poetic feeling as to hold the reader and compel his admiration. 

 By Sir Archibald Geikie the Antlitz has been termed "a noble 

 philosophic poem in which the story of the continents and the 

 oceans is told by a seer gifted with rare power of insight into the 

 past." 



' Vol. I is translated into Italian. 



