tified contempt, to a world bound
hand and foot to Barald's Theory of Vertices and "compensating electric
nodes." "They shall see," he wrote--in that immortal postscript to The
Heart of the Cyclone--"the Laws whose existence they derided written in
fire beneath them."

"But even here," he continues, "there is no finality. Better a thousand
times my conclusions should be discredited than that my dead name should
lie across the threshold of the temple of Science--a bar to further
inquiry."

So died Lavalle--a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at his
funeral Cellier jested at "him who had gone to discover the secrets of
the Aurora Borealis."

If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Collier's
theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the
Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams we
have, definitely, Lavalle's Law of the Cyclone which he surprised in
darkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora
Borealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have
passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the
snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon
the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of
his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to the
zenith.

"Master," I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him, "what is it
you seek today?" and always the answer, clear and without doubt, from
above: "The old secret, my son!"

The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but (cry of the
human always!) had I known--if I had known--I would many times have
bartered my poor laurels for the privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrera
possess, of having aided him in his monumental researches.

It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumes
consecrated to the ground-life of his father, so full of the holy
intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the
utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was
not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that
imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a
farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must
be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she
writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found "in
this un