Born on the 14th of May 1815 in Geneva — a year after his little 
father-state had escaped from its temporary subjection to the first 
Bonapartist empire of France, and had joined the Helvetic Con- 
federacy — Emile Plantamour’s commencing epoch was that of young 
Switzerland, and he ultimately became as excellent a representative 
as could be found anywhere of that peculiar yet admirable microcosm 
of a republic, whose strict observance of law and order the red 
agitators of Paris can by no means understand ; and even the 
United States of North America, republicans and democrats alike, 
do not altogether comprehend how it can. continue to exist so 
anomalously to them — “ a republic without a president ! ” And yet 
it not only exists, but lasts and grows, produces wealthy families 
too, capable, as with the Plantamours, of educating themselves up 
to the highest pitch of usefulness to their State, without seeking 
any help from others beyond the use of the self-supporting institu- 
tions in that case already made and provided. 
But just as the school, or “the old college,” wherein the young 
Plantamour spent the earliest of his hard-working years of learning 
as a boy, was of that staid and solid character that might be 
expected in an institution founded by Calvin, soon after the 
Beformation, so the comfortable private means of the older Planta- 
mour’s, like that of so many other Genevan families, had been 
attained in a manner worthily corresponding thereto. For not by 
manufactures nor by commerce, still less by speculations or bubble 
companies, were those tidy little Alpine accumulations obtained, 
but by the magnificent moral control of the progenitors of the family 
and their successors, one and all determining to live, though put to 
any straits for a time, on half only of their yearly income, leaving 
the other half to grow at compound interest. 
Emile Plantamour himself was still too young to think much of 
these things while at Calvin’s school; but by the time he had 
passed through that institution, also through the higher academy of 
Hofroyl, and then the classes of the Genevan University, he was 
called on to choose his future walk in life as a working member 
of the busy republican mountain hive. So he elected to be an 
astronomer — a Helvetian astronomer of course. But what is there 
peculiar in that prefix'? This mainly, that while the Helvetian 
confederation forms so small a patch of country, surrounded by 
