feel within myself the strength of a whole genera- 

 tion/' he wrote to his father at that time, and 

 launched himself upon the publication of his costly 

 " Poissons Fossiles " with no clear vision of the quar- 

 ter from whence the payment might be expected 

 to come. 



At Neuchatel (where between the ages of twenty- 

 five and thirty he enjoyed a stipend that varied 

 from four hundred to six hundred dollars) he organ- 

 ized a regular academy of natural history, with its 

 museum, managing by one expedient or another to 

 employ artists, secretaries, and assistants, and to 

 keep a lithographic and printing establishment of 

 his own employed with the work that he put forth. 

 Fishes, fossil and living, echinoderms and glaciers, 

 transfigured themselves under his hand, and at 

 thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputa- 

 tion, recognized by all as one of those naturalists 

 in the unlimited sense, one of those folio copies of 

 mankind, like Linngeus and Cuvier, who aim at 

 nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole 

 of animated Nature. His genius for classifying was 

 simply marvellous ; and, as his latest biographer 

 says, nowhere had a single person ever given so 

 decisive an impulse to natural history. 



Such was the human being who on an October 

 morning fifty years ago disembarked at our port, 

 bringing his hungry heart along with him, his con- 

 fidence in his destiny, and his imagination full of 

 plans. The only particular resource he was assured 



