Horace Benedict de Saussure, who, like so many eminent Genevans, was of French extraction, was born in 1740. Nominally, his work in life, entered upon at the age of twenty-two, was that of Professor of Philosophy at the Geneva University; but his real work, continued almost until his death, was that of the explorer, student, and exponent of the mountains. Some time before the end he was able to boast that he had crossed the Alps by eight different passes, made sixteen other excursions to the centre of the range, and travelled in the Jura, the Vosges, and the mountains of DauphinÉ. His marriage—he married young—by no means hindered him from climbing. Madame de Saussure indeed objected, quite failing to understand his readiness to forsake the comforts of the hearth in order to revolutionize the science of geology. But he put his foot down in a letter which may perhaps be read with profit by other ladies besides her to whom it was addressed:

‘In this valley, which I had not previously visited, I have made observations of the greatest importance, surpassing my highest hopes; but that is not what you care about. You would sooner—God forgive me for saying so—see me growing fat like a friar, and snoring every day in the chimney-corner after a big dinner, than that I should achieve immortal fame by the most sublime discoveries, at the cost of reducing my weight by a few ounces and spending a few weeks away from you. If, then, I continue to undertake these journeys in spite of the annoyance they cause you, the reason is that I feel myself pledged in honour to go on with them, and that I think it necessary to extend my knowledge of this subject, and make my works as nearly perfect as possible. I say to myself: Just as an officer goes out to assault the fortress when the order is given, and just as a merchant goes to market on market-day, so must I go to the mountain when there are observations to be made.’

Nor was it only in the domestic circle that de Saussure could put his foot down if required. In one of the Genevan revolutions—that of 1782—he also showed his mettle in an energetic fashion. He was a magistrate at the time, and one day, when he came down to the HÔtel de Ville, he found that the popular party had risen in revolt, and seized the building. The rioters requested him to take his place, and exercise magisterial functions on lines which they would dictate. When he refused, they arrested him, but released him on the following day. Then, hearing that they proposed to search his house for arms, he decided to resist. He, Trembley, the mathematician, his family, his servants, and his dog, constituted the tiny garrison. They barricaded the doors, stationed themselves at the windows armed with muskets, and successfully defied a gang of revolutionists who came to blow them up with hand-grenades. His assailants were reduced to threatening to murder his friends if he did not surrender; and it was only this final menace that brought about the capitulation of the Genevan Fort Chabrol.

Our business here, however, is not with the politician, but with the traveller and the man of science. His widest celebrity is no doubt due to his famous ascent of Mont Blanc. If he was not the first man to climb that mountain, he was, at any rate, the first to believe that it could be climbed. Bourrit, as late as 1773, had written of ‘the absolute impossibility of attaining to its summit.’ De Saussure, as early as 1760, had offered a reward to anyone who could find a way to the top, and undertaken to pay a day’s wages to anyone who tried and failed. The reward was not claimed until twenty-six years later, when Jacques Balmat got it. When the way was found, de Saussure, though now forty-seven years of age, at once made haste to follow it. His ascent—the third—was accomplished on August 3, 1787; he published a short pamphlet, giving an account of it, in the course of the same year.

The climb was, beyond question, a great feat for a philosopher of forty-seven, and it brought the name of de Saussure under the notice of thousands of people who would never otherwise have heard of him. A still greater feat, accomplished a little later, was the camping out, for something over a fortnight, on the Col du GÉant. But it is not upon either of these feats that de Saussure’s real fame reposes. He is reckoned among great men partly because he was the first student of geology who knew his business, and partly because he is the only Alpine writer of his period whose works have stood the test of time. The geologists who preceded him fall into two classes. There were the mere fossilizers, who had about as much claim to be considered men of science as have the stamp-collectors of the present day; there were the theorists who geologized, so to say, in the air, threw out hasty generalizations from their studies, and thought it beneath their dignity as philosophers to correct these hypotheses by the further observation of phenomena. De Saussure combined their methods. His life was one long, patient study of geological phenomena. But he collected in order to collate; his aim was always to see the part in its relation to the whole, the particular in its relation to the general; and he had a fine contempt for the amateurs who collected fossils in the same spirit in which they might have collected pottery or bric-À-brac.

‘The one aim,’ he wrote, ‘of most of the travellers who call themselves naturalists is the collection of curiosities. They walk, or rather they creep about, with their eyes fixed upon the earth, picking up a specimen here and a specimen there, without any eye to a generalization. They remind me of an antiquary scratching the ground at Rome, in the midst of the Pantheon or the Coliseum, looking for fragments of coloured glass, without ever turning to look at the architecture of these magnificent edifices.’

The most remarkable thing, however, is that de Saussure, being a geologist, should have been a stylist. He certainly never meant to be one. He would never have written a book merely to show his skill in word-painting; his one purpose in writing was to communicate discoveries of importance. At the time when Bourrit was making himself famous by his picturesque descriptions of the Alps, the greater man wrote to him modestly: ‘I too have an idea of publishing something on the natural history of these mountains. It is with that end in view that I have been studying them for so many years.’ And in the introduction of his great work, he apologizes for what seems to him the baldness of his style: ‘More practised in climbing rocks than in polishing phrases, I have attempted nothing more than to render clearly the objects which I have seen, and the impressions which I have felt.’

It was an apology offered without affectation or false modesty. It announced a departure from the literary fashion of the day, which was to write of the mountains in the language of high-flown sentiment. Rousseau had set the fashion; Ramond de CarbonniÈre, the philosopher of the Pyrenees, was ready to carry it on; de Luc and Bourrit were doing what they could. De Saussure wished to announce himself as the disciple of none of these, but as the plain man who had made a careful study of his subject, and wished to be heard because of what he had to say and not because of his manner of saying it. He hardly understood that he was, in the full sense of the word, a man of letters—a literary artist. That is a point which has since been settled in his favour by his readers.

He might easily have written a treatise that would have been invaluable to specialists and intolerable to everyone else. Guided by a sure instinct, he preferred to write the narrative of his journeys, taking the reader, as it were, by the hand, making him his confidant, showing him his discoveries in the order in which he makes them, and so luring him on to take an interest in a subject generally accounted dull. And, though his first care was always to observe, and to collate his observations, with a view to the advancement of learning, there always was in him something of the poet, which must out from time to time, temporarily giving the go-by to the man of science.

One finds this vein of poetry in the writings of most men of science—naturally, seeing that they used gifts of imagination differing from those of the poet only in being disciplined and chastened, and ready to submit to the thraldom of the established fact. Sometimes, indeed, the vein of poetry has interfered with business, as in the case of the ingenious Scheuchzer, who laid himself out to prove that there were dragons in the Alps, or, in a less degree, in the case of Buffon. But, whether it interferes with business or not, there the vein of poetry almost always is. Such old men of science as Conrad Gesner, and such modern men of science as Huxley and Tyndall, have shown us with what striking effect it can be worked. It is because de Saussure worked it so well that his writings still live, though, regarded merely as textbooks, they have long since been superseded.

The humanity of the man is continually flashing out at us in the reflections and anecdotes with which he illustrates the manners of the strange peoples in the strange places which he visited. Sometimes it is a flash of humour, as when he inquires the motives that impel men to be chamois-hunters, a trade that never pays. ‘It is the dangers,’ he concludes; ‘the constant alternation of hopes and fears, the continual emotion thus engendered, which excite the hunter, just as they excite the gambler, the soldier, the navigator, and even, to a certain extent, the naturalist of the Alps.’

Sometimes it is a touch of pathos, as in the story of the old woman of ArgentiÈre whose father, husband, and brothers had all perished, within a few days, from an epidemic:

‘After she had given me some milk, she asked me where I came from, and what I was doing there at that season of the year. When she knew that I was from Geneva, she told me that she could not believe that all the Protestants were to be damned; that God was too good and too just to condemn us all without distinction. Then, after reflecting for a moment, she shook her head and added: “But what is so strange to me is that of all those who have been taken away from us, not one has ever come back. I,” she went on, with a look of pain “have wept so for my husband and my brothers, and have never ceased to think of them, and every night I implore them to tell me where they are, and whether they are happy. Surely, if they existed anywhere, they would not leave me in this doubt. But perhaps,” she went on, “it is because I am not worthy of this favour. Perhaps the pure and innocent souls of those children there”—she pointed to the cradle as she spoke—“are conscious of their presence, and enjoy a happiness that is denied to me.”’

Truly a wonderful passage to find embedded in a valuable and solid treatise on geology. Ramond never surpassed it though he laid himself out to do so, and—in his earlier works, at all events—never allowed geological considerations to stand in the way of sentiment.

It is sad to relate that, after having made himself known to all Europe as ‘the illustrious de Saussure,’ the pioneer of geological discovery fell upon evil days. But so it was. His health broke down; in 1794 he began to have paralytic strokes. His fortune—the greater part of it, at all events—was lost through the collapse of securities during the French Revolution. He was on the side that suffered most in the political disturbances which the Revolution engendered at Geneva.

In the midst of those disturbances, his father-in-law, Charles Bonnet, died, and de Saussure, himself almost to be reckoned a dying man, was called upon to pronounce his public eulogium. But the disturbances made it necessary for the ceremony to be postponed. A letter in which Madame de Saussure narrates the incident gives us a clear impression not only of the day, but also of the times of which the day was representative.

‘Yesterday,’ she writes, ‘I spent one of those days of emotion which do not affect us the less because we ought to be getting used to them. The people took up arms by order of the Committees of the Clubs. The gates were shut, the cannon rumbled along the streets, screaming women leant out of their windows to look. In the evening the town had that military air which you have sometimes seen in it—the streets full of armed citizens with flaming torches, patrols challenging the passers-by—and all this lasted till two or three in the morning; whereas to-day, everyone is at his shop, his cafÉ, or his office. And this tumultuous day had been selected for the celebration of the memory of the most peaceable of citizens—your uncle, Charles Bonnet.’

And so, amid such sorry scenes, the end approached. De Saussure sought relief and health in travel. He took the waters at PlombiÈres, but without any good result, and died early in 1799, the great Cuvier pronouncing his eulogy before the Institut de France.