know the results. If, then, there be any merit in our discoveries, I must share the honor with him; and I have great satisfaction in rendering him this act of public justice."
Huber practised Burneus in the art of observation; comparing his results with those of other investigators. He directed him by a thousand questions, adroitly combined, till fully satisfied of his fidelity and accuracy. At the first issue of the book, which was the record of their joint labor, the naturalists of Europe looked askance at the marvelous revelations of bee-economy made by a blind man aided by a peasant; but, as knowledge upon the subject grew, prejudices melted away, and there is scarcely a fact recorded by Huber which subsequent investigation has not again and again confirmed.
The marvelous activity of mind, which to many men would have proved only a torment, was to Huber a source of the deepest delight. His love of music, and proficiency in the art, beguiled many hours, and added greatly to his social enjoyments. He had made himself master of counterpoint, and was able, from the dictation of the bass of a musical composition, to arrange the harmonies. The whole piece or song would be dictated to him, in this way, phrase by phrase, and a single repetition was all-sufficient.
He invented, for his own use, a printing-machine, by means of which he could correspond with his absent friends; and he was enabled to indulge his fondness for walking in the open air by means of another contrivance of his own. He caused knotted cords to be stretched along the borders of all the rural paths around his house; by means of the cord he could guide himself, and the knots informed him what point he had reached.
Soothed by every appliance which ingenuity and ample means could afford, surrounded by the tenderest affection and the keenest sympathy in his pursuits, his darkened life was full of sweet compensations. But it is in himself, rather than in the circumstances of his life, that we find the sources of his tranquil happiness. He retained to extreme age the tenderest affection for his friends; he showed to the last the untouched freshness of delight in Nature, the boyish candor and directness, the noble enthusiasm, the quick sympathy with youth and its interests, which so generally characterize men of science, and which offer one of the most unanswerable arguments in favor of the ennobling influence of such pursuits.
"When any one spoke to him on subjects which interested his head or heart," says De Candolle, "his noble figure became strikingly animated, and the vivacity of his countenance seemed, by a mysterious magic, to animate even his eyes, which had been so long condemned to darkness. The sound of his voice had always something of the solemn. 'I now understand,' said a man of wit to me one day, who had just seen him for the first time—'I understand how young people willingly grant to the blind the reputation of supernatural inspiration.'"
