960 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 104. 



Like his other books the style is clear, forcible, 

 piquant, sometimes highly colored, but solid in 

 its facts. 



After his acceptance of the chair of geology 

 and zoology at Geneva, which he was at first 

 unwilling to take, Vogt rendered, besides his 

 academic work, public services to his adopted 

 country, aiding with his geological knowledge 

 in the building of railroads, reporting on the 

 geology of the Credo tunnel. He was a mem- 

 ber of the Grand Council of the Canton of 

 Geneva from 1856 to 1862, and at other periods 

 until 1880, and of the National Council from 

 1878 to 1881, and showed his public spirit in 

 other ways, at times when the calm of public 

 life was not always serene and perfect. 



His ability and foresight as a man of affairs of 

 the liberal or even radical school, is shown in his 

 open letter in 1859, when he demanded the free- 

 dom of Italy and of Hungary, and the unity of 

 Germany. Again, after the Franco-German War 

 of 1^70, he suggested that as a means of lasting 

 peace Alsace be given up to the French, truly a 

 statesman-like proposition. 



With Sars, Agassiz and Quatrefages, Vogt 

 was one of the fii'st to study living animals at 

 the seashore in an improvised laboratory ; but 

 while at Villefranche, in 1850, working on the 

 Siphonophores, he insisted on the importance 

 of laboratories of marine zoology, and the part 

 they should take in the progress of this science, 

 and brought all the influence he could to bear 

 on the Minister of Public Instruction of Aus- 

 tria, to establish a zoological station on the 

 Adriatic sea, at Misamar. Three years later 

 he labored with the Minister of Public Instruc- 

 tion of France to establish such a station at 

 Nice, and recommended as professors, MM. La- 

 caze-Duthiers and Blanchard. He exei-ted all 

 possible pressure, says his biographer, on his 

 influential friends in France, Spain, Austria, 

 Germany and Italy to bring about this end, 

 and, we are told by his biographer, it was at 

 his instance and at his instigation that Dr. 

 Anton Dohrn, then (in 1868) at the Congress 

 of Naturalists at Innsbruck, decided to found, 

 at his own expense, the zoological station of 

 Naples, now so successful and magnificent in 

 all its arrangements. He also rendered dis- 

 interested services to Lacaze-Duthiers in estab- 



lishing the admirable station at Roscoflf, where 

 he spent several summers, working up there 

 his Becherches cotieres, and seconded, according 

 to his means and influence, the station of 

 Marion at Marseilles, of Giard at Wimereux, 

 and of Sabatier at Cette. Of late years and 

 up to the year of his death, Vogt worked with 

 his students at the Eussian station at Ville- 

 franche. 



We now have to consider Vogt as an 

 evolutionist. His antipathy to metaphysics 

 and to the philosophy taught when he wa& 

 young was pronounced. But from the first he 

 sympathized with evolutionary philosophy, and 

 before the time of Haeckel was the leading: 

 propagandist of the theory of descent in Ger- 

 many, and for his active warfare in this direc- 

 tion has been called the Huxley of Germany 

 and Switzerland. He translated the ' Vestiges 

 of Creation ' soon after it appeared. With 

 Claparede and DeCandolle, the Gevenese zoolo- 

 gist at once accepted the principles set forth in 

 Darwin's Origin of Species. Even to Vogt it 

 was a revelation. 



As early as 1843, in his Embryologie des Sal- 

 mones, Vogt wrote: " Xe developpement d'une 

 classedans Vhistoire de laterre offre, a divers egardSy 

 la plus grande analogic avec le development d^un in- 

 dividu aux differentes epoques de sa vie. La demon- 

 stration de cette verite est un des plus beaux rS- 

 sultat de la paleontologie moderne. ' ' 



In 1851 in his Zoologische Briefe he thus ex- 

 pressed himself: " The species is the reunion of 

 all the individuals which derive their origin 

 from the same parents and which become again 

 by themselves or by their descendants like their 

 first ancestors." In his lectures on man, de- 

 livered in 1862, he defined a species as a com- 

 pound of individuals whose characters show that 

 they are the genuine or possible descendants 

 from a common source. In this work he in- 

 sisted that man had descended from the apes,, 

 though he wrongly maintained that the few 

 cases of microcephalous monsters known are 

 cases of reversion to the ape condition. He 

 now actively spread evolutionary views, and in. 

 a letter to Huxley, dated March, 1863, he wrote 

 that the doctrine was making " de grand pro- 

 gres en Allemagne. Une foule de jeunes savants 

 se presentent, ' ' that Virchow (now regarded as 



