Page:A memoir of Lewis David von Schweinitz.djvu/43

34 and which grew with the increase of every faculty, and lasted to the closing period of his too short career; with a purity of mind and heart which made every truth of nature a lesson in virtue; with an intrepidity in the prosecution of scientific enterprizes which led him out of beaten tracks, and taught him to find pleasure in threading those very labyrinths from which most other travellers in the paths of knowledge, shrink in despair; with a clearness of method which enabled him to communicate to others the full advantage of his own discoveries in these mazy haunts of nature; with a candour and fairness which never merged the man of honour in an effort unduly to elevate the man of science; never sought, by questionable artifices, to obscure or to hide the just reputation of others; with a benevolence of disposition which enabled him to find every where, in works of creation, the traces of that beneficence, which, in his professional character, it was his highest pleasure to pourtray, and his most ardent desire to imitate; with a cheerfulness of disposition, and a suavity of manners, which rendered him an object of deep affection in every social relation; with a rectitude of purpose which won the confidence, while it formed the character of youth,—and secured the gratitude, while it watched over the interests of age; with an assiduity which encountered the fatigues of many voyages, not always without peril, in the service of that cause to which he was devoted; with a patient continuance in years of toilsome effort, to extend, by precept and example, the benign system of practical goodness and spiritual