reference to his scientific labors-such as ammonites and terebratulas, lava masses and other eruptive rocks, jurassic limestone, and chalk, druses of crystals and fossil leaves from the brown coal.

The mining and smelting officers of the crown, the professors of the Academy, in uniform, together with the students, at present uncommonly numerous even from the most distant foreign lauds, filled the academic halls.

Professor BREITHAUPT first ascended the tribune and opened the exercises with the following remarks:

Honored Friends! An aged, venerated and lordly oak in the German grove of science has fallen. Leopold von Buch is no more! Deeply do we feel this painful loss, the more deeply, as we may justly say, that in many respects, he belonged especially to us. Already in 1790 he was matriculated at the Academy of Mines at this place, and here his gifted genius laid the foundation of its subsequent comprehensive attainments. He ever remained true and attached to his alma mater, kindly communicating the rich fruits of his profound observations and investigations, and supporting without intermission a friendly intercourse with the literati of Freiberg. Only three years since, at Werner's festival held at this place, where he was the foremost ornament among those then present, he proved his old and honorable attachments by a noble act of munificence. To such a man are we in duty bound to pay a public token of our reverent acknowledgment and of our warmest thanks; and for that purpose are we here to-day convened-at this festival to his memory.

Through Professor Cotta we shall forthwith learn how much and what signal service the great geognost and geologist has rendered to science. The extent of Von Buch's merit will ever cause his name to shine forth bright and brighter as a star of the first magnitude, not alone in Germanic literature, but also whereever his favorite science may find a votary. By us can he never be forgotten to us he will be ever peculiarly near aud dear.

Then followed the eulogy by Professor COTTA.

We stand here before the manes and before the portrait of a man who devoted his whole life to Nature-of a man who once was Freiberg's and Werner's scholar, and whose fame now resounds far away over Germany's and Europe's boundaries, whose memory we will love, and so much the more ardently honor and celebrate, as he went forth from this school of mining life.

Leopold Baron von Buch was born on the 26th of April, 1774, probably at the old ancestral castle of the family at Stolpe, in the Uckermark in Prussia. Scarcely 16 years of age, he entered, on the 10th June, 1790, Freiberg's walls, where, under Werner's especial guardianship, and partially in his own house, he spent

three years. Here it was, that an intimate and long enduring friendship was formed between him, Alexander v. Humboldt, and Carl Freisleben. After the completion of his mining studies, he it was who most of all next to von Humboldt gave origin to that beautiful saying of d'Aubuisson de Voisin, that "Werner's disciples scattered themselves over every land and interrogated Nature as to her import from pole to pole." He also it was, however, who first of all brought back a negative answer from these wanderings. He went forth into the world a true and convinced disciple; soon, however, fact after fact accumulated before his clear vision, till he was convinced, at first, doubtless, painfully convinced, that his much loved master must have erred in one fundamental point.

We all are subject to error; and those who come after us will certainly know more, and know it much better, than we. It can therefore on that account never be made a subject of reproach to a disciple, that he has given up the system of his master from conviction; and it were also the worst way of honoring great men, to say nothing of its opposition to the spirit of true science, were we blindly to cling to all of their errors. On the contrary the acknowledgment of an error, or the discovery of a new truth on the part of the disciple, is ever a proof of the ability of both. The master has awakened a spirit of independent investigation-the disciple, by that, has laid down a proof of his own impartiality and of his independence. And never can a disciple in such a case act with more delicacy and forbearance against a master than did v. Buch, who never meauly attacked the old, but on the contrary presented the new only with more convincing power.

L. v. Buch wandered over,—and that too mostly on foot, as it behooves a naturalist to do,-one after another, not only all the mountain chains of Germany, the Alps from Nice to Vienna, the Appenines from Turin to their most southern spurs, the hilly chains of England and the highlands of Scotland, but he was almost as much at home in France as in Germany. He traversed again and again the Pyrenees, climbed the summit of Etna, and the sublime Peak of Teneriffe. He had early wandered among the crystalline mountains of Scandinavia, and late in life even, when almost an old man, he wandered all over the Highlands of Greece, till then better known to the philologist than to the geologist. Everywhere, even where he only transiently tarried, he left behind him, as v. Humboldt says, luminous and radiant footsteps.

Thus was he ever, year after year, up to his advanced old age -to the very end of his days, on journeys. In early summer he wandered forth, and only with the storms of autumu did he return to his neat ground-floor study on the banks of the Spree,

where a cheerful domestic establishment surrounded the worker, with nothing however of that luxury which might have been expected from a man of his rank and opulence. The faithful Mrs. Baumgarten-known to almost every geologist-had been for more than twenty years his only attendant; and it very often happened that he himself opened the door to the one who rang. Were it a stranger who then had come, and asked, "Is Mr. v. Buch at home?"—he received an answer according to circumstances― "I will sce❞—or, "what do you wish of him”—or, "No." Even a well known acquaintance he sometimes also asked, "To whom do you come?"-or, began immediately even in the portal the conversation-generally with a question-on some determinate scientific subject. Once, while I was engaged in the geological survey of Thuringia, and visited him, he asked, even in the house-door, "Now does Ammonites semipartitus occur also in Eichsfeld?"

I have purposely made mention of these apparently insignificant circumstances, because they characterize the man, and because the last especially, shows the great activity of his mind, which, in moments of the greatest surprise, forthwith and omitting every introductory phrase, began at once at the very heart of the subject-at all times interesting to the new comer. However, I shall soon have occasion to speak of many peculiarities which not a little characterized the departed.

Permit me next to cast a glance at what science has gained from his life and genius. It would engage our attention for many an hour were I to enumerate all for which geology is indebted to him, who also in the departments of natural science as elsewhere, has given manifold proofs of a genius deep searching into the very heart of things. For it is especially characteristic of his labors, that he never lingered over trivialities, but knew how to discern at a glance the essential from the unessential, to render the characteristic distinctly characteristic, and to seek out the true connection of phenomena. It is less difficult even for an acknowledged obtuser mind, to make numerous and accurate observations, than through these to discern the legitimate in nature. This latter gift, however, was lent to L. v. Buch in a degree possessed only by the few.

The copiousness of his discoveries, however, will make it necessary for me to limit myself, at this time, to those alone, which appear the most important.

He it was who first of all in Germany proved with precision that the disturbance of the original relations in the deposition of strata. cannot be explained alone by events on the surface, but that these have had in most cases a deep seated subterranean, plutonic or volcanic origin. He showed by little and little that not only the basalt, but also the other crystalline massive rocks have been

pressed upward from below in a molten condition like lava; and that by these same reactions of the earth's interior, the elevation of mountain chains, and of whole districts of country have been brought about.

He first directed attention to the determinate, and often reciprocally parallel, direction of lineal mountain chains, or extensive dislocations of strata. He distinguished four principal lines of elevation in Germany, upon which generalization Elie de Beaumout afterwards building, founded his artificial system of mountain. lines, which, however, in its last form was not admitted even by L. v. Buch himself. He was the first of all to show that the large volcanoes had had their origin not alone from the simple heaping upon one another of lava streams and loose ejected masses, but that they had been elevated to a higher altitude together with the consolidated masses before present. In this manner he distinguished craters of elevation, and craters of eruption; and if in this last division he may in isolated cases have gone too far, still the most essential part of his doctrine will always remain of the highest importance.

Having once had his attention directed to the effects of volcanic activity, he investigated the mode of distribution of volcanoes upon the earth, registered upon charts all known ones, and showed that they were distributed partially in groups and partially in lines of which the last mentioned evidently were arranged upon long extended lineal cracks in the earth's crust. These investigations were first communicated in his splendid work on the Canary Islands.

Besides the local effects of the present volcanic activity as it is there developed where active volcanoes exist on the earth's surface, he early recognized also the effects of this same force in its more universal and less distinctly remarked phases. He it was who first of all in Germany proved that the continuons remarkable changes of level on many of the Baltic coasts cannot have their origin, as was generally believed to be the case, in the sinking of the sea, but that they are to be explained only by a gradual secular elevation of a great part of Sweden. And this view has since then been established beyond a doubt by an earlier opposer of it, Sir Charles Lyell.

I will not linger long over his theory on the part which the Melaphyre has played, and its influence on the formation of Dolomite, because this of all of his new views is perhaps most subjected to doubt. But even if this whole hypothesis should fall to the ground, still it was at any rate put forth with so much spirit and ingenuity, that it earned and obtained at the time, the highest attention, and in the most lively manner drew the attention of others to new investigations. In general the beautiful, lively and convincing manner of representation in all v. Buch's

labors is not the least part of their merit. In so simple and clear a style can no one write who is not perfectly master of his subject. Somewhat characteristic of him is it also, that he always shunned all references in the text, and with right, for they never belong to the embellishments of a book. They are generally only a consequence of the fact that the author is not able to spin out into one thread all that he would say, or that he has hung them on to prove his erudition, or they are entirely superfluous and do not belong to the subject. As they are impossible in the flowing speech, they should also be avoided as far as possible in written productions.

During the period of his long scientific career, occurred the discovery of the true meaning and the geological worth of organic remains; which till then had been looked upon as unessential things and had been but little noticed. Scarcely was their true import known than L. v. Buch entered upon this new department with the greatest zeal and happiest result.

First of all he devoted himself to the Ammonites, long however, before that peculiar delineations had been observed upon the surface of their interior petrified casts. Their true import and legitimate cause however had till then remained a mystery. He showed that they came from the walls of the interior concameration and at the same time pointed out the peculiar laws of their development, which for priineval zoology and for geology has become alike equally important.

He next turned his attention-ever seizing first of all upon what was at the time most important-to the genera Terebratula, Spirifer, and Productus, which, as paleontological remains, are found so extremely abundant in all formations, but which of all this division of the Brachiopods, formerly so numerous in species, are represented in the present seas only by a few species of the first named genus. Also here he discovered the determinate laws of form which stand in the most intimate relations to the mode of life of those remarkable animals. In a similar manner he later elucidated the Cystidea-a remarkable division of the Radiatawhile earlier he had already described, in a splendid work, the fossils collected in America by Alexander von Humboldt and Ch. Degenhard, in these cases animating by his genius those long extinct forms of a primeval world as if they were still sporting amid the living.

The study of Organic Remains, which has given to geology an entirely new direction, also led him, who first introduced the conception of characteristic fossils for formations, to the more precise study of the strata in which they occur. In an extensive work he showed the nature and extent of the Jura formation in Germany. In this he proved that its strata had been deposited around a primeval continent, and by this pointed out the former division