Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/131

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SKETCH OF CARL VOGT.
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are simply functions of the cerebral substance. It was condemned by the ecclesiastics and was the subject of controversies in the German universities. On one of his journeys his attention was drawn, by witnessing the operation of the fishermen, to the Bay of Villafranca as a suitable station for zoölogical research. He fixed a laboratory there and set down to work. In a short time he was invited by Liebig to return to Giessen as professor of geology. The officials at Darmstadt, recollecting his revolutionary proclivities, opposed and delayed his confirmation, bringing all manner of objections against him, and among them that he had opposed von Buch and ridiculed his theories. Von Buch, however, attested to his fitness for the position; Humboldt recommended him, and he was appointed in December, 1846, and took his position in April, 1847. He delivered and published his inaugural address, On the Present Condition of the Descriptive Sciences; translated Desor's Geological Excursions; published his Ocean and Mediterranean; and had just completed the arrangement of his Zoölogical Laboratory when the revolutions of 1848 broke out. He was chosen to represent Giessen at the Congress of Deputies, or Vor Parlament, which met at Frankfort, March 31st, and again at the German Parliament, of May 18th. He wrote vigorous articles for the liberal journals; and when the Parliament was driven to Stuttgart in May, 1849, he was named one of the five regents of the empire, to whom discretionary powers were given. When Stuttgart was placed under siege he retired to Bern, where, as a member of the Committee of Assistance, he succored political refugees of all countries. When the throng of refugees had thinned out, Professor Vogt made another sojourn at Villafranca and published studies of the siphonophores and tunicates or salpæ, issued two or three political satires under scientific disguises, translated the Vestiges of Creation, and published the Zoologische Briefe, a book which became a necessity to students.

In March, 1852, M. A. Tourte, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Geneva, offered Professor Vogt the chair of botany in the academy there. The offer was declined, botany not being a specialty of Vogt's, and he was offered geology and paleontology with embryology. He made himself felt in the life and fortunes of the city, and rendered valuable service to Geneva and Switzerland. He was consulted as a geological expert in the building of the railroads of the country; was interested in the first conception of the St. Gothard Tunnel, which was pierced years afterward under the direction of another Genevan; he assisted in the foundation of the National Institute of Science, Letters, Pine Arts, and Agriculture, and was its president for a quarter of a century; he sat at different times, twenty-one years in all, in the Grand Council of the Canton