Page:The Whitney Memorial Meeting.djvu/26

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THE WHITNEY MEMORIAL MEETING.

power in the little company that spent the summer among the swamps and mosquitoes of the great copper region. That man was Eduard Desor, already a young naturalist of distinction, and afterward famous both in science and in public life in Switzerland. He had come only a short time before, with Agassiz, and as his friend and intimate associate in scientific undertakings, from Neufchâtel to Cambridge. He was by nature full of the purest love for science; and that love had been quickened to ardent enthusiasm by his own work, and by his intercourse with other bright minds and eager workers whom he had known in Paris and Neufchâtel and in the Swiss glacier-camps of Agassiz. Small wonder if the intimate relations of that summer's camp-life in common gave opportunity for potent influence of the brilliant young Huguenot upon the brilliant young Puritan. It is to Desor, and to his words and example, that my Cambridge colleague attributes in large measure his brother's determination to devote himself to a life of science rather than to business or to one of the learned professions. That the chosen department was Sanskrit may be ascribed in part to the accident of the books thrown in his way; in part to the interest of the language and antiquities of India, intrinsically and as related to our own; and in part to the undeniable fascination which the cultivation of the virgin soil of an almost untrodden field has for a mind of unusual energy, vigor, and originality.

William Whitney has left a full and interesting journal of this summer. Tuesday, July 24, while waiting for the uncertain propeller to come and rescue them