Arnold Guyot. 359 



great personal beauty and rare nobility of character." Arnold- 

 Henri, one of twelve children, was born at Boudevilliers, on 

 the 28th of September, 1807, and was named after the Swiss 

 patriot of the fourteenth century, Arnold von Winkelried. 

 About 1818, the family moved to Hauterive, three miles from 

 Neuchatel, where his father died the following year. From 

 the house at Hauterive young Guyot had before him, to the 

 southeastward, the whole chain of the Alps from Mt. Blanc to 

 Titlis, and his sensitive nature must have drawn inspiration 

 from the glorious view; the same deep draughts that he 

 attributed to young Agassiz, in his Academic memoir of his 

 friend, with reference to the same circumstance — the snowy 

 Bernese Oberland, the Jungfrau, the Schreckhorn, the Fiuster- 

 aarhorn, the Eigers, and other summits to Mt. Blanc, " looming 

 up before his eyes in the view from his house." Such views 

 are calculated to make physical geographers and geologists of 

 active minds. Guyot early found pleasure in the collection of 

 insects and plants, and evinced in this and other ways the 

 impress that Nature was making upon him. 



Previous to the year 1818 and for a while after, Guyot was 

 at school at La Chaux-de-Fonds, a noted village " at the foot 

 of a narrow and savage gorge of the Jura," 3,070 feet above 

 the sea. In 1821, then fourteen years of age, he entered the 

 College of Neuchatel, where he was a classmate of Leo Les- 

 quereux, the botanist. "Guyot and I," says Lesquereux, 

 "were for some years brothers in study, working in common, 

 and often spending our vacations together either at Guyot's 

 home at Hauterive, or with my parents at Fleurier, and I owe 

 much in life to the good influences of this friendship." His 

 studies were classical — Latin, Greek and philosophy, arranged 

 for preparing a boy for the profession of the law, medicine or 

 theology, with almost nothing to foster his love of nature. 



In 1825, then eighteen, he left home to complete his educa- 

 tion in Germany. After spending three months in Metzingen, 

 near Stuttgart, in the study of the German language, he went 

 to Carlsruhe, where he became the inmate of the family of Mr. 

 Braun, a man of wealth and scientific tastes, the father of the 

 distinguished botanist and philosopher, Alexander Braun, the 

 discoverer of phyllotaxis — terms of intimacy with the family 

 on the part of several of his relatives having been of long 

 standing. The family comprised also a younger son and two 

 daughters. Agassiz was then a student at Heidelberg, along 

 with young Alexander Braun and Carl Schimper, but he spent 

 his summer vacations at the Carlsruhe mansion. A vacation 

 soon came. " The arrival of the eldest son of the house," says 

 Guyot, "already distinguished by his scientific publications, 

 with his three university friends — Agassiz, Schimper, the 



