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SCIENCE. 



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



run after him crying '■Assen Vogt ! Assert Vogt ! ' 

 On one occasion, while lecturing in a German 

 city, the fanaticism of the lower classes rose to 

 such a pitch that the windows were smashed in 

 by a volley of stones. Vogt, without losing 

 his presence of mind, went on to show his 

 audience the means taken to close the road to 

 the young science already difficult to tread, when 

 a large pebble fell on his desk ; he took it and 

 held it up before the assembly and exclaimed : 

 ' ' Je vous parlais hier des sauvages ancetres de 

 Vdge de la pierre; vous vous rendrez facilement 

 compte, en ce moment, que cet dge Id n'est par en- 

 core tout A fait termine. " It is said that Broca 

 labored in vain to persuade him to respect the 

 feelings of the lower orders. 



Yogt was prominent in founding the Prehis- 

 toric Congress of Anthropology initiated by de 

 Mortillet ; read a number of papers before it, 

 presenting at the Bologna meeting his paper, 

 Anthropophagie et les Sacrifices humains, which 

 contained some extreme conclusions as to the 

 universality of this custom. 



In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War ap- 

 peared his '■ Lettres politiques,^ claimed by his 

 biographer to be 'a fiery and eloquent protest in 

 the name of right, justice and liberty against 

 brutal conquest and unrighteous war,' which 

 were widely read. He warned the French not 

 to underrate the strength of their enemy, and 

 apropos of the seizure, by Germany, of Alsace 

 and Lorraine explained what the result has 

 well shown, that this conquest would for a long 

 time prevent any possible reconciliation be- 

 tween the two nations. He deplored the spirit 

 of militarism, which he believed to be the 

 cause of all the evils afflicting Europe, and 

 longed for the suppression of great standing 

 armies. 



After this the busy student returned once 

 more to zoology. He translated Gegenbaur's 

 Anatomy, some of Darwin's works, and in 

 1875 published an Atlas der Zoologie. He even 

 printed a study entitled Structure microscopique 

 des roches volcaniques, and on volcanoes, and 

 communicated these and other papers to the 

 first meeting of the French Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, which he was specially 

 invited to attend. In his study of the Berlin 

 Archseopteryx (1879), which he vainly tried to 



obtain for the Geneva museum, he maintained 

 that it was neither a bird or reptile, but formed 

 ' une type intermediaire des plus caracterises et 

 confirmes, d'une maniere eclatante, les vues de 

 M. Huxley.' 



In 1879, when the anti-Semitic persecutions 

 arose in Germany, he was among the first to de- 

 fend the oppressed and plead for just and fair 

 treatment of the Jews, and in 1893, when the 

 anti-Semitic views penetrated into Switzerland, 

 the last public address of the Geneva professor 

 was read by a Federal Councillor before the Na- 

 tional Council at Berne. 



A characteristic of Vogt, showing his freedom 

 from petty vanity, was his declination of Aus- 

 trian, Spanish, Danish or Italian decorations, 

 but he gladly accepted the cross of the Cheva- 

 lier de la Legion d'honneur, given him by 

 Gambetta, his friend and admirer. 



His last work, Traite d'' anatomic comparie 

 pratique, written with the cooperation of Emile 

 Yung, begun in 1888, was completed but a year 

 (1894) before his death. He seems to have left 

 unfinished an autobiography begun in June, 

 1894. Vogt died, his intellect unclouded to the 

 last, in his eightieth year, March 5, 1895, after 

 an illness of a few weeks. 



Such is the life of this man. A busy and, 

 for a naturalist and student, an eventful one. 

 He was remarkably many-sided in his interests, 

 and ever ready to drop his scalpel and pencil to 

 take his share in public affairs. 



It has been said that had Vogt not spread 

 over so much ground and had confined himself 

 to zoology, and to a single phase of that many- 

 sided science, he would have taken a higher 

 rank as a man of science. It may be said that 

 he belonged to a school now passing away. He 

 was the product of a transition period in the his- 

 tory of biology. Certainly he may be ranked 

 as an embryologist and general zoologist or 

 morphologist next to the best, and he was only 

 inferior to such men as Miiller, Owen, Huxley, 

 Agassiz, Milne-Edwards. His best works in 

 zoology were those on the embryology of the 

 Salmonidse and of the Gastropods, and the mor- 

 phology of the Siphonophores. His attempts at 

 classification were, however, not always success- 

 ful, as seen in his separation of the Cephalopoda 

 as an independent type from the other molluscs. 



