the Philippines was complete. The significant preface, written at Florence, in which he relates how his scientific activity had been interrupted a decade before, is dated the 4th November, 1858. "The moment appeared to me to be, at that time, too serious to permit of any mental gift or bodily endowment, whatever their greatness or insignificance, being withdrawn from the public service: a bulwark had to be constructed against the dissolution of society; the break-down had to be prevented of all that was great and noble, of all that had been shaped and hallowed in the long course of centuries; service was demanded by right and order, in one word by the Emperor. To execute this duty I had to bid adieu to my property near Vienna, to my villa formed according to my own taste. There I had hoped, surrounded by the memorials of a stormy life and by those charming witnesses of my wanderings, the plants which I had brought home, to finish my days in quiet work. But duty called me back to an active life, to that world of affairs which I had forsaken a quarter of a century before. That for the Austrian soldier and diplomatist in Italy the last decade can have been no time of leisure for original speculation requires no detailed proof."[1]
In the year 1860 he was appointed Minister[2] at the Belgian Court. It was a post that suited him in many respects. A sovereign, full of ripe experience of the world and of knowledge of men, who, amidst the most ominous circumstances, had built up an orderly system on treacherous ground, had consolidated young institutions, had reconciled, or at least controlled, old antagonisms; a future Queen born of the Imperial house; a Catholic people in the midst of which lingered many a Hapsburg tradition—all this both
- ↑ See Notes (18).
- ↑ Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary.
