Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/563

Rh floras through the past, the variations of climate, the movements of the crust of the earth, all these subjects, recently hidden, now just brought to light, alike depend on the persevering labors of Oswald Heer, and derive from his researches at least partial elements for their solution." "Nature" remarked, in noticing his death, that "however the study of fossil plants may rank in the time to come, Heer's name will forever be bound up with it as its great pioneer." And Dr. Asa Gray said, on a similar occasion, that his works "make an era in vegetable paleontology. Their crowning general interest is, that they bring the vegetation of the past into direct connection with the present."

was born at Niederutzwyl, in the Canton of St. Gall, Switzerland, August 1, 1809, and died in Lausanne, September 27, 1883. His father was a clergyman, originally of the Canton Glarus, and came of a family that enjoyed an honorable distinction in Swiss history. Of the three branches of the family tracing their descent from a common ancestor, Councilor Abraham Heer, born in 1580, one was extinguished in the male line in the fifth generation; the second, after having produced a number of honored statesmen, came to a similar end with the death of Federal Councilor and President of the Federation, Dr. Joachim Heer. The third branch, whose sons through five generations have nearly all been clergymen, is the one to which the subject of this sketch belonged, and it still lives in several families.

Oswald Heer was an infant of good physical promise; but before he was a year old he was brought nearly to the grave by scarlet fever, and never recovered from the effects of the attack. He was made weak for the rest of his life, for many years an invalid; but, having inherited a strong constitution, he was nevertheless capable of enduring extraordinary fatigue with great ease. In 1811 Pastor Heer was called to be director of a newly founded high-school for boys at Glarus, where he was guaranteed a position for three years, and eventually remained five years. Thence, in January, 1817, he removed to Matt, in the Kleinthal, where Oswald spent his boyhood. In that deep recess of the mountains, whose only communication with the world at the time was by an arduous bridle-path, the good pastor performed the part of a general dispenser of beneficences. He urged the construction of better roads; there being no doctor at the place, he learned to take care of those who were brought to him with frozen limbs or hurt by avalanches; he introduced inoculation for the small-pox; he taught the workmen in the slate-quarries lessons of temperance and thrift, to save their earnings rather than spend them in the beer-shops where they were paid to them; and he labored hard and with success to supply his people with improved schools.

The tendencies of young Heer's mind began to assert themselves in the earlier stages of his education, which was conducted under the supervision of his father. He kept an exercise-book, in which he reproduced a number of moral and religious stories. Among these