HUBER 
523 
the steps of their dancing master, the great¬ 
ness of the tragic days to come. 
From early childhood Francois attended 
lectures at Genevan College. Before he was 
15, he had completed a course in physics 
under I)e Saussure. He had familiarized 
himself with chemical manipulations in the 
laboratory of the old alchemist. But a too 
intense and steady application to his 
studies and the habit of constantly reading 
late into the night by dim lamplight or 
dimmer moonlight seriously injured his 
health. At fifteen, he broke down, utterly 
prostrated and threatened with blindness. 
His terrified father—all gayety forgot— 
rushed him to a famous doctor in Paris 
who ordered him to the country. Near 
Paris is the quaint little village of Santi, 
and here the boy Huber ploughed and 
sowed and milked and lived the life of an 
ordinary peasant lad. His youthful strength 
rebounded swiftly and he returned to the 
city with vigor completely restored. But 
there another doctor, a celebrated oculist, 
broke to them the solemn news that his 
eyesight could not be saved. Slowly but 
surely he was to become totally blind. One 
eye had the same disease that had 
“quenched the orbs” of Milton—amauro¬ 
sis; the other had cataract, which the doc¬ 
tors were unable to cure. Francois and 
his father went back to Geneva. And the 
boy went bravely on. 
The childish love between Francois and 
Marie was deepening with the years, and 
now his only fear was that his affliction 
might alienate her. So he constantly mini¬ 
mized its seriousness, even to himself, 
scarcely admitting its steady desolating de¬ 
velopment. He talked always as tho he 
could see perfectly, and so formed the hab¬ 
it, later carried so noticeably into his writ¬ 
ings, of speaking about seeing with perfect 
clearness what he saw only with the inner 
eye—altho there certainly with perfect 
clearness. But he need not have worried 
about Marie. Her affection was so deeply 
rooted that not even her father’s' bitter op¬ 
position, which at times amounted to per¬ 
secution, could turn her from this great- 
souled young man who was so soon to pass 
into complete outer darkness, but who held 
so bravely and steadily to the stronger light 
within. As soon as she reached her major¬ 
ity she married him, shortly before he be¬ 
came totally blind. The tender devotion 
that brought her to that shadowed altar 
made beautiful 40 years of married life. 
She was at different times her husband’s 
reader 1 , his secretary, his observer; and was 
always closely absorbed in the work that 
absorbed his attention. When he was an 
old man he once said, “As long as she lived 
I was not sensible of the misfortune of be¬ 
ing blind.” 
Another close personal association came 
to Huber thru Francois Burnens, whom he 
first employed as a servant. Soon, how¬ 
ever, the keen inner sight of the master 
had discovered in the man those rare tal¬ 
ents that make the skillful observer. So 
Bumens became his invaluable and highly 
trained assistant in working out his one life 
purpose, research into the life and habits 
of the honeybee, displaying remarkable pa¬ 
tience and skill thru countless experiments 
and under literally thousands of questions, 
by which Huber guided, directed, sifted, 
and tested his efforts. In one experiment 
to learn something about laying woi’kers, 
Bumens caught one by one every bee in 
two hives which were suspected of having 
laying workers. This required 11 days of 
steady work, during which time he stopped 
only long enough to rest his eyes (the 
pathos of the master’s insistence upon 
this!). Huber gave public testimony to his 
worth, insisting upon sharing his own hon¬ 
ors with one who “counted pain and fatigue 
nothing compared with the great desire he 
felt to know the result.” 
The results of Huber’s observations and 
his long extensive investigations were writ¬ 
ten as letters to his famous naturalist 
friend, Bonnet, whose own sight was failing 
so that he had given up his active scientific 
investigations and was devoting his later 
years to philosophy. When these letters 
appeared later in book form as “New Ob¬ 
servations on the Honeybee,” some scholars 
at first raised mental eyebrows and smiled 
doubtfully at observations conducted by a 
blind man assisted by a peasant. But that 
attitude could not last. Scientists are nec¬ 
essarily just and honest, and these swiftly 
threw aside their first prejudice and ac¬ 
corded to Huber’s book the great place it 
stills holds after the passing of all these 
years. 
He wrote in a wonderfully lucid style 
