Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/568

552 the geographical and microscopical societies and societies of art, and with writing articles on political and social economy for the journal Réforme; in addition to which he projected a great work on the Beginnings of Science. At the same time his health grew worse, and in the fall of 1887, while his general appearance was still not changed, he expressed to his friends the opinion that he would hardly live through the winter. He was confined to his bed in February, and died in July, 1888. He was buried, in accordance with his dying wish, in the most simple manner, in the public ground, with no stone to mark his grave. Nevertheless, a handsome monument, seven metres high, adorned on its four sides with appropriate astronomical and meteorological emblems, has been erected to him by the city of Mons, on one of its public squares, near the railway station, and was unveiled on the 2d of June, 1890, with addresses by the burgomaster of the city; M. Folie, Director of the Observatory; and M. Auguste Houzeau.

Most of Houzeau's principal works have been mentioned in the course of this sketch. His minor papers and special publications were very numerous, contributed to different societies and journals, and touched, as M. Lancaster well says, on nearly every branch of human activity. M. Lancaster's list gives eighty-six titles, counting as one matter contributed to the New Orleans Tribune enough to fill a dozen volumes. He was made a correspondent in the Class of Science in the Belgian Academy in 1854, and two years afterward a member of that body. He was a member of several other societies in Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, London, and Vienna.

expresses the opinion, in his Darwinism, that animals are spared the pain we suffer in the anticipation of death, and that their lives are, therefore, lives of almost perpetual enjoyment; even the watchfulness they have to keep up against danger, and their flight from enemies, are, he believes, the pleasurable exercise of the powers and faculties they possess. Dr. E. W. Shufeldt, after many years of incessant study of animated forms of high and low degrees in the systematic scale, has come to very different conclusions from these. He believes that there has been as much evolution of mind, or reasoning powers, in animals as of organic structure; and that while the anticipation of death in the ordinary course has very little to do with marring the pleasures of life among men or animals, the immediate presence of death is awful to both. Instances are not wanting to prove that most of the higher animals appreciate the difference between a living and a dead body, and realize much of the suffering due to the fear of death as apart from the physical pain that may accompany it. In the case of flight from an enemy, or in the face of any other danger that may result in death, Dr. Shufeldt is convinced that the animal pursued, be it man or some of the vertebrated forms in the scale below him, experiences very much the same kind of sensations. Those who have studied timid animals under such circumstances "know full well that their pleasures in such flights are by no means unmixed ones, but are rather infused with a very large share of pain, and pain of a very high order."