Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/713

Rh experiment his eyes were strongly affected, bnt he did not suspect that he had done them a permanent injury. This experiment undoubtedly laid the foundations of that disease which twelve years later brought on total blindness.

After being forced to resign his work, in 1830, he again resumed it at Brussels. In 1835 Quetelet urged Plateau to apply for the professorship of experimental science in the University of Ghent. The young savant refused at first to offer himself as candidate for a position in the first institution in his native land, pleading youth and inexperience; but later his scruples were overcome, and he received the appointment to the chair.

As soon as he began his work in Ghent, he found the collections of the university very poor and meager. He gave himself at once to the work of remedying this deficiency. In order to inform himself, he visited and examined minutely the most celebrated collections in England, France, and Germany. He addressed the Government and the inspector of the university, and pleaded his case so well that in the end—though it was only after long and wearisome labor—he succeeded in securing one of the finest physical cabinets in existence to the University of Ghent.

In 1840 Plateau married Mile. Clavareau, daughter of a director of tax-collections. She was always a devoted wife and true helpmate to him. Outliving him, she was able to comfort, sustain, and help him when darkness settled over his life. In 1841 his son Félix, now Professor of Zoölogy and Comparative Anatomy in the University of Ghent, was born. During the same year the disease which ended in total blindness made itself felt. For two years he submitted to the most painful treatment in hopes of saving his eye-sight. The trouble which had attacked the right eye extended to the left. During these long months neither his terrible affliction nor his excruciating suffering ever drew a word of complaint from his lips.

The courage which showed itself in this heroic endurance was far from being merely passive. Nothing daunted by what, in a lesser man, would have ended his life's work, Plateau never lost courage. The future must have looked very dark even to his courageous spirit, but he gave no token of failure. Happily, all material anxieties were removed by the action of his countrymen. He was appointed "professeur ordinaire," and a little later a royal order, countersigned by M. Rogier, assured him of the enjoyment of the entire salary and emoluments of his position. A noble recognition of the man and of his services—a recognition fully justified by forty years of fruitful work, and by a series of discoveries "which have made Belgian science illustrious throughout the entire world."