USA > New Jersey > Mercer County > Genealogical and personal memorial of Mercer County, New Jersey > Part 4
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From Berlin, Guyot went to Paris, June, 1835, and there took charge of the education of the sons of the Count de Pourtales-Gorgier for four years, forming one of the great friendships of his life. Letters of introduction from Humboldt led to much intercourse with Brongniart and other learned men of the city, and during the summer months he accompanied the family to the Pyre- nees. While there he made ascents of the higher peaks and excursions in various directions, study- ing the features and flora, and comparing them with those of the Alps. Later in the year hie traveled to Belgium, Holland and the Rhine, with his pupils, making a study of the characteristic features of these countries. The following year. while on a visit to Pisa, he made various baro- metrical measurements, determined the elevation of the observatory at Florence and other points. In the spring of 1838 Guyot was urged by Agassiz to visit the glaciers and make a study of them. The result of these studies was the foundation of most of the important laws con- cerning the formation, nature, and motion of
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glaciers, which were announced in a pa- per read before the Geological Society of France. These discoveries were subsequently illustrated and confirmed by the investigations of Agassiz and Forbes, while Guyot, with character- istic modesty, remained silent and did not even publish his paper until 1883. December 1, 1841, Guyot communicated the results of his observa- tions of 1838, so far as relates to the "blue bands," at a meeting of the Neufchatel Society of Natural Sciences. reading some passages from his notes of 1838. That he did not continue his study of this subject was owing to his yielding it to Agassiz, and fidelity to his friend curbed and silenced him, and so his paper, with the ex- ception of the paragraphs on "blue bands," which had been quoted by Agassiz, remained buried un- til long after the death of the latter.
Guyot returned to his native land in 1839 and immediately became an active member of the Society of Natural Sciences, which had been in- itiated by Agassiz in 1832, and was made one of a committee for the organization of a system of meteorological observations in Switzerland, and the selection of the best instruments for this pur- pose. Upon the establishment of the Academy at Neufchatel he was appointed to the chair of His- tory and Physical Geography, and became a col- league of Agassiz. As history had not been one of his special lines of study he hesitated to accept the appointment, yet, having once accepted, he made it a matter for serious study for two years, and finally, as success crowned his efforts, was thrown upon a sickbed. His deep interest in liis subject and his pupils made instruction a source of pleasure to him, and in his two depart- ments he gave thirteen general and special courses of lectures. With regard to these, Mr. Faure says: "From the first, in spite of his appre- hensions, he captivated his audience by his easy elegant, sympathetic words, by the breadth of his views and the abundance and happy arrange- ment of his facts. He had each winter afterward the pleasure of seeing men of cultivation of all classes in Neufchatel pressing into the large hall of the college and listening to him with riveted attention. What zeal he inspired! What ardor for work! The fire with which he was filled passed to us. He was more than a professor ; he was a devoted friend, a wise counsellor, asso- ciating himself with us and encouraging us in our work."
Beside lecturing and instructing, Guyot did all
he could of outside work-meteorological, baro- metric, hydrographic, orographic, and glacial- istic. He made eleven hundred soundings of Lake Neufchatel, as a commencement of a study of the annual variation of temperature of the waters of the Swiss lakes. From 1840 to 1847 he spent his summers in laborious research among the bowlders or erratics over Switzerland and in Italy, and as a result collected about six thott- sand specimens of rocks, one set of which he placed in the museum at Neufchatel, and the other he presented to the museum of the College of New Jersey, after his connection with that in- stitution. The only recreation he allowed himself during these years was, in the words of Agassiz, "at the end of the working season, the pleasure of a visit of a few days to the lively band of friends established on the Glacier of the Aar, in order to learn the results of their doings and com- municate his own to them." Brief notes on his work were published in the Bulletin of the Neuf- chatel Society of Natural Sciences for Novem- ber, 1843, May and December, 1845, and Janu- ary, 1847. Guyot reserved the complete report for the second volume of Agassiz's work on gla- ciers, the first volume of which appeared in Paris in 1847, but the revolution of 1848 put an end to these plans. During the same year, when Guyot had been teaching at the "Academy" for a period of nine years, that institution was sup- pressed by the Grand Revolutionary Council of Geneva. June 13 brought the tidings, and June 30 came the end "without any indemnity to the professors." He had long been urged by Agassiz to come to America, but had hesitated to break the bonds of friendship and association which held him to his native country. Especially pain- ful was the thought of leaving his aged mother and his two sisters. His mother, however, after carefully considering the letter of Agassiz, was in favor of the project, and Guyot left for Amer- ica the following August. He had formed no plans as to the future, was without knowledge of the English speech, and more than forty years of age, so it was but natural that he should look forward with apprehension. Soon after landing in New York he was with his friend Agassiz in Cambridge, and felt he was in a land where no political or religious shackles were in the way of success, and where an audience as wide as the continent was ready for whatever he had to com- municate. Two weeks after his arrival in this country he went to the meeting of the American
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Association at Philadelphia, and then made his first journey to the Alleghanies, on his return stopping at Princeton, where he delivered a letter of introduction to Dr. Charles Hodges, and there made friends who later welcomed him as a colleague. Upon his return to Cambridge he was invited by Mr. Lowell to deliver a winter course of lectures at the Lowell Institute, and he re- sumed his academic work in Boston, taking for his subject "Comparative Physical Geography." His lectures were delivered in French, without notes, and from that time he had an American reputation. These lectures, written out after the delivery of each, were translated by Professor Felton "with rare kindness and a disinterested- ness still more rare," says Guyot, and published under the title of "Earth and Man." It became an epoch-making book.
In reply to an inquiry as to the originality of his views, he wrote, December 6, 1856, as fol- lows: "The principle at the basis of develop- ment is at the bottom of all the modern philoso- phy of Germany, especially the philosophy of nature, but in what an abstract and indigestible form will be seen on opening any one of their uninviting volumes. Goethe, the poet and phil- osopher, has in a more concrete and tangible form, the beautiful law that the more homogeneous the lower the organism, and the more diversified in its parts the higher the grade. Steffens, of Berlin, acted more directly on my mind, and from him I got a distinct view of the importance of the internal contrasts and differences as regards the process of life. All these notions of the law were taken, as was natural, from the organized being ; I do not recollect to have seen it applied, as I have applied it, to inorganic nature ; to as- tronomy; to geology-I mean to the growth of continents, and to the successive and increasing diversifications of the surface keeping pace with the wants of an increasing development of life ; to Physical Geography, in which the law of in- ternal contrasts, as conditions of a more active life, plays so great a part. Hence the whole scheme of that part of Earth and Man. This law thus became for me the key for the appre- ciation and understanding and grouping of an immense number of phenomena both in Nature and History. My views of the human races and of universal history are, in great part, on the same basis. So also the idea of the true sense of the first chapter of Genesis as a characterstic of the great organic epochs." His recognition
of the same principle in organic nature is ex- pressed as follows in a letter of March 17, 1856: "But do we not too much forget that even struct- ure is but a means-the expression of a function or mode of life, which mode or function is the idea of it, and in one sense its cause ? If so, then structures express only various aspects and functions of life, animal or vegetable, and they are related and connected together as the vari- ous aspects, modes, and functions of organic life are with the essential idea of life itself. Now, life is esentially (I mean phenomenally) growth, development, movement from phase to phase, from birth to death, and it seems to me that I can find no principle which gives me a more clear, natural, and connected idea of the innu- merable types and forms of vegetables and ani- mals than to consider them as typical of so many phases of life, whether of growth, or mode of life, or function of life." Concerning his views on the geographical march of civilization, he refers to the historic nations, and says, in conclu- sion : "Asia, Europe, and North America are the three grand stages of humanity in its march through the ages. Asia is the cradle where man passed his infancy under the authority of law, and where he learned his dependence upon a sov- ereign master. Europe is the school where his youth was trained; where he waxed in strength and knowledge, grew to manhood, and learned at once his liberty and his moral responsibility. America is the theatre of his activity during the period of manhood, the land where he applies and practices all he has learned, brings into ac- tion all the forces he has acquired, and where he is still to learn that the entire development of his being and of his own happiness are possible only by willing obedience to the laws of his Maker."
Guyot's lectures in Boston were a brief re- capitulation of his educational work in Neufcha- tel, and they made him famous as a geographer of the widest and the most elevated kind. He was soon known as a man of practical ideas con- cerning school instruction in geography and otli- er subjects, and he was followed in his ideas that geographical instruction should be from nat- ure and not books. These views, which he had imbibed from his teacher, Carl Ritter, were so obviously good that they spread rapidly. When Carl Ritter received a copy of "Earth and Man," from his old pupil, he sent him a letter of con-
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gratulation, with the strongly underscored word "Excellent !" three times repeated. He also wrote to him that he had made the volume his vade mecum on a long summer journey. This work has been translated into German, Swedish and French. Upon the conclusion of this first course of lectures, Guyot was appointed by the Massachusetts Board of Education to lecture upon geography and the methods of instruction in the Normal schools and Teachers' Institute, and this position, which he held for six years, took him throughout the state. He lived to see his methods of instruction become universal, and between the years 1861 and 1875, he prepared a series of school geographies of different grades, concluding with a school Physical Geography. also a series of thirty wall maps, physical, politi- cal and classical, all of which have been widely used. His plan for the completion of the series in a general Treatise on Physical Geography was never carried out, owing to his idea that he was not sufficiently master of the English lan- guage. He received an appointment to the pro- fessorship of Physical . Geography and Geology at Princeton, in 1854, and in the following year removed thence with his family, where he found his tastes, his social instincts, and his desire to impart ideas as well as to acquire them, fully gratified. In addition to his professorship he undertook other educational work, being for sev- eral years lecturer on Physical Geography in the State Normal School at Trenton; from 1861 to 1866 lecturer extraordinary in the Princeton Theological Seminary, on the Connection of Re- vealed Religion and Physical and Ethnological Science ; giving a course of lectures in the Union Theological Seminary, New York; and in con- nection with a university course in Columbia College, New York. He delivered a series of five lectures on the Harmonies of Nature and His- tory, in 1853. at the Smithonian Institute, and six lectures on the Unity of Plan in the System of Life, in 1862. He also did important work in Princeton College in the establishment of a mus- eum, which his gift of six thousand rock speci- mens materially enriched. These are displayed in cases in connection with maps in the room. The Memoir of Guyot, by Professor William Libbey, Jr., speaks of the museum as the most substantial monument that Professor Guyot has left in Princeton.
He had met Professor Henry, of the Smith- sonian Institute, shortly after his arrival in this
country, and this meeting was followed by the perfecting of plans for a national system of meteorological observations. Guyot was charged with the selection and ordering of the new in- struments, and his directions for meteorological observations were published by the institution. The later edition of this work contained more than two hundred tables, admirably arranged. In reference to this work, Guyot says: "It is es- sentially a work of patience, in doing which the idea of saving much labor to others and facilitat- ing scientific research is the only encouraging ele- ment." One important part of this work consist- ed in the selection and establishment of the me- teorological stations. He made a general oro- graphic study of the state of New York in 1849 and 1850, and thirty-eight stations were located by him at widely-distributed points. At the same time he patiently instructed the observers sta- tioned at these points in the use of the necessary instruments. Similar work was also done in the state of Massachusetts. The exploration of 1849 extended into the depth of winter, often over un- broken roads and in rough conveyances, but noth- ing daunted his enthusiasm. This work, carried on under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institu- tion, was the initiator of the United States Signal Service Bureau. Beside this general survey of New York and Massachusetts, Guyot, during his leisure weeks in the summer and autumn months, carried on a study of the altitudes and orography of the mountain system of eastern North Amer- ica. In a letter of October 3, 1859. speaking of his work of that season in the Smoky Mountains, he says: "My trip to the Smoky Mountains was a long and laborious one. Much rain, great dis- tances, imperviable forests, delayed me two months. I camped out twenty nights, spending a night on every one of the highest summits, so as to have observations at the most favorable hours. The ridge of the Smoky Mountains I ran over from beginning to end, viz : to the great gap through which the Little Tennessee comes out of the mountains." A new system of the whole Appalachian chain was made by his nephew, Ernest Sandoz, under his direction, and this was published in 1860, in the July number of Petermann's "Mittheilungen." This work ex- tended from his forty-third to his seventy-fifth year, and was considered by him his "vacation" work. No one before him nor since his time has made more numerous and more accurate measure-
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ments of this nature. His maps and geographies received the gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1878, and the medal of progress, a special lionor, was awarded him at the Vienna Exhibi- tion of 1873. His last work was "Creation, or the Bible Cosmogony in the Light of Modern Science." This was finished a few days prior to his death, which occurred February 8, 1884. He was a member of the National Academy in this country ; an honorary member of the Geographi- cal Society of France; associate member of the Royal Academy of Turin ; and a member of 1111- merous other societies. Among his most impor- tant writings may be mentioned; Inaugural Dis- sertation, at Berlin, on the Natural Classification of Lakes; On the Structure of Glaciers and the Laws of Glacier Motion; On the Ribboned Structure of the Glacier of Gries : Observations on the Erratic Phenomena of Lower Switzerland and the Juras: On the Law of the Formation and Distribution of Glacier Crevasses; Erratic Phenomena in the Alps : Earth and Man, or Lect- 11res on Comparative Physical Geography in its Relation to the History of Mankind: On the Up- heaval of the Jura Mountains by Lateral Pres- sure; Directions for Meteorological Observa- tions : On the Topography of the State of New York; Address at the Humboldt Commemora- tion of the American Geological Society; Carl Ritter : On the Physical Structure of the Appala- chian System of Mountains : Altitudes in North Carolina and Georgia; Cosmogony of the Bible, or the Biblical Account of the Creation in the Light of Modern Science ; Memoir of James Cof- fin; Memoir of Louis Agassiz; Physical and Orographie Map of the Catskill Mountain Re- gion ; On the Existence in Both Hemispheres of a Dry Zone and its Cause ; and numerous others, as well as many papers communicated to the Na- tional Academy, but not deposited in manuscript. Guyot's face and manner showed deep and earn- est thought. His chief weakness was an unob- trusiveness that disinclined him to assert him- self, and made him too easily content with work without publication. He was of medium height, with deep-set eyes and spare figure, and his pow- er of walking and climbing seems to have had no bounds until long after he had passed the three score and ten mark. Scarcely six weeks prior to liis death he wrote to a friend, "Even last year I could have told you of my seventy-six years and my ability still to climb our mountains, but unhappily it is not so now." He was a man
of devoted friendships and there was no limit to his good will and kindliness. In conversation he commanded attention, and, through his wealth of ideas, secured the several high positions he oc- cupied in this country. He was a fervently re- ligious man, a Christian, following closely in the footsteps of his Master. On the 7th of Novem- ber, 1864, he writes from Princeton: "I have bought the house in which I live, and my care has been to prepare and shape the garden for the next season according to my taste. A quiet re- treat to study and write, and good friends visit- ing me in it and filling it with the warm rays of affectionate friendship, is an ideal for which, if realized. I should heartily thank God." This house, with its beautiful garden, made by the hand of its owner, became a social center, and the place of pilgrimage of many distinguished men, Americans and foreigners.
His death was sincerely mourned. The fu- neral services were held in the church and excel- lent memorial discourses were pronounced by Rev. Horace Hinsdale and Dr. James Murray, dean of the college. The remains were interred in the Princeton Cemetery. The following ex- tract is from the minutes of the Faculty of the College of New Jersey: "His life-work was prosecuted with such intellectual vigor, indefatig- able energy, conscientious fidelity, and distin- guished success, that, among the eminent men of science of which the present age has been so prolific, the name of our departed colleague will ever occupy a conspicuous position. His char- acter commanded the esteem of all within the wide radius of his acquaintance. In deportment he was ever a model of propriety, dignified yet courteous, decided in his convictions yet modest in expressing them, considerate not only of the rights but of the feelings of all with whom he was associated, never unkind in word or act, and one of whom no one ever spoke or thought un- kindly, singularly guileless and unselfish, a pure- minded, large-hearted, loving, and lovable Chris- tian gentleman. His sincere, humble, childlike piety gave an attractive charm to all his con- duet and conversation, and no one could be asso- ciated with him without feeling its elevating, re- fining, and ennobling influence. It was fitting that such a life should be crowned by the pro- duction of a work that will be prized by sincere seekers after truth respecting the works and the word of God .- an exhibition of the harmony of science and revealed religion."
Sohne Machan
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Professor Guyot married, in 1867, Sarah Dore- mus, a daughter of tlie late Governor Haines, of New Jersey. She was a woman of great intelli- gence and refinement, who made for him a happy home, and who added largely her help in his in- tellectual life, his gentleness, consideration, and warmth of heart contributing to that happiness.
JOHN MACLEAN, D.D., LL.D., tenth presi- dent of the College of New Jersey, now Prince- ton University, was the oldest son of Professor John Maclean. M.D., and Phoebe Bainbridge, of Princeton. He was born March 3. 1800, and was prepared for college by his father and at the Princeton Academy. Entering college in 1813 he was graduated in 1816, one of its young- est students. For a few months he taught at Lawrenceville. In 1818 entering Princeton Theo- logical Seminary he remained there two years. At the same time he had been appointed a tutor in Greek in the college, and had thus com- menced his long career in connection with that institution. In 1822 he was elected to fill the chair of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy ; in 1823 he was made professor of Mathematics alone; six years later he was transferred to the chair of Languages and in 1830 to that of An- cient Languages, and in 1847 he was made pro- fessor of the Greek Language and Literature. He had been elected vice-president of the college in 1829, and in 1854, on the resignation of Presi- dent Carnahan, he was made president, resign- ing in turn in 1868 to be succeeded by Dr. James McCosh. From 1868 he was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He was also president of the American Colonization Society. He re- ceived the honorary degree of D.D. from Wash- ington and Jefferson in 1841, and the similar degree of LL.D. from the University of the State of New York in 1854. He was a director of the Princeton Theological Seminary from 1861, and a member of the New Jersey State Board of Education. He died of old age on August 10, 1886, at Princeton, and is buried in the Princeton cemetery. He was unmarried.
Dr. Maclean was ordained a minister by the Presbytery of New Brunswick in February, 1828, and from that time, although he never held a formal pastoral charge, he was prominent in the affairs of the church. He was repeatedly a member of the general assembly, taking active part in all matters pertaining to the constitu- tion of the church, to education, to temperance
and to the doctrinal discussions that led to the division of the church in 1837-1838. In order to promote a better understanding between the parties at odds, and to defend the more import- ant proceedings of the general assembly on the issues between the old and new school branches of the church, he wrote in 1837 for the "Presby- terian" a series of six exceptionally able letters, republished the following year in pamphlet form under the title "A Review of the Proceedings of the General Assembly at the Session of 1837." In 1838, as a representative of the Presbytery of New Brunswick, he was present at the as- sembly when the division in the church occurred, and was appointed to draw up a "Circular Let- ter to the Foreign Evangelical Churches," on the issues involved. Again in 1843 and 1844 he was a member of the assembly when the im- portant question of the office of ruling elder was settled, and his ability in defence of the major- ity's view again led to his appointment as the official public spokesman in drawing up a reply to the minority's dissent and protest. In 1844 he published under the title "Letters on the El- der Question" the thirteen communications which he had written on the question for the "Presby- terian" and which contain a clear summing up of the majority's position.
His most pretentious literary work was a "His- tory of the College of New Jersey" in two vol- umes, written after he had resigned from the presidency, and published in 1877, containing the history of the institution from the founding in 1746 to his inauguration in 1854. He left mat- erials for the history of his own administration partly in the form of an autobiography which has not yet been made public. Furthermore in 1876 he issued for private distribution a memoir of his father, Professor Maclean, which was re- published in a second edition in 1885. In addi- tion to these publications he was the author of several essays and sermons which not only testify to his piety and orthodoxy and to his beautiful Christian character, but reveal powers which lead to the belief that, had he not been so contiu- ously overwhelmed with the petty duties of col- lege administration during times more troublous than pleasant, and with other cares which a too generous disposition induced him to shoulder. he might have produced writings of permanent and prime importance.
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