s: "Courage! I shall not
fall till I have found Truth, and I hold you fast!" rings like the
call of trumpets. This is that Lavalle whom the world, immersed in
speculations of immediate gain, did not know nor suspect--the Lavalle
whom they adjudged to the last a pedant and a theorist.

The human, as apart from the scientific, side (developed in his own
volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity,
clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such as
doubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character and
will to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained
the opening and consummation of the Tellurionical Records extending over
nine years. Of their tremendous significance be sure that the modest
house at Meudon knew as little as that the Records would one day be the
planet's standard in all official meteorology. It was enough for
them that their Xavier--this son, this father, this husband--ascended
periodically to commune with powers, it might be angelic, beyond their
comprehension, and that they united daily in prayers for his safety.

"Pray for me," he says upon the eve of each of his excursions, and
returning, with an equal simplicity, he renders thanks "after supper in
the little room where he kept his barometers."

To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting--he who
had looked into the very heart of the lightnings--the dogmas of papal
infallibility, of absolution, of confession--of relics great and small.
Marvellous--enviable contradiction!

The completion of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himself
was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours--labours from
which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have
shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the
oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable
heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by
league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting
cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost
ether of the upper atmosphere each one of the Isoconical Tellurions
Lavalle's Curves, as we call them today. He had disentangled the nodes
of their intersections, assigning to each its regulated period of flux
and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herrera and Tinsley, his pupils,
to the final demonstration as calmly as though he were