SAUSSURE, HONORÉ BÉNÉDICT DE, a celebrated naturalist, was a native of Geneva, and born in the year 1740. His father was an intelligent farmer, who lived at Conches, about half a league from Geneva, and the youth seems early to have taken to the study of natural history. Botany, which was his favourite study, was the means of introducing him to the acquaintance of the great Haller, to whom he paid a visit in 1764, and who was astonished at his intimate acquaintance with every branch of the natural sciences. His attachment to the study of the vegetable kingdom was also increased by his connection with Charles Bonnet, who had married his aunt, and who put a proper estimate on the talents of his nephew. He was at that time engaged in the examination of the leaves of plants, to which Saussure was also induced to turn his attention, and published the result of his researches, under the title of Observations sur l'écorce des Feuilles et des Pétales, in 1762. About this time the philosophical chair at Geneva became vacant, and was given to Saussure, at the age of twenty-
Sauveur. one. During the first fifteen years of his professorship he was alternately engaged in discharging the duties of his office and in traversing the mountains in the vicinity of Geneva; and in this period his talents as a great philosopher were fully displayed. He extended his researches on one side to the banks of the Rhine, and on the other to the country of Piedmont. He travelled to Auvergne to examine the extinguished volcanoes, going afterwards to Paris, England, Holland, Italy, and Sicily. The first volume of his travels through the Alps, which was published in 1779, contains a circumstantial description of the environs of Geneva, and an excursion as far as Chamouni, a village at the foot of Mont Blanc. It contains a description of his magnetometer. In proportion as he examined the mountains, the more was he persuaded of the importance of mineralogy; and that he might study it with advantage, he acquired a knowledge of the German language.
During the troubles which agitated Geneva in 1782, he made his beautiful and interesting experiments on Hygro-metry, which he published in 1783. This has been pronounced the best work that ever came from his pen, and completely established his reputation as a philosopher. De Saussure resigned his chair to his pupil and fellow-labourer, Pictet, who discharged the duties of his office with reputation. In 1786, he published his second volume of travels, containing a description of the Alps around Mont Blanc, the whole having been examined with the eye of a mineralogist, geologist, and philosopher. It contains some valuable experiments on electricity, and a description of his own electrometer. To him we are indebted for the cyanometer, for measuring the degree of blueness of the heavens, which is found to vary according to the height of the observer; his diaphanometer, for measuring the transparency of the atmosphere; and his anemometer, for ascertaining the force of the winds. He founded the Society of Arts, to the operations of which Geneva is very much indebted for its continued prosperity. Over that society he presided to the day of his death, and the preservation of it in prosperity constituted one of his fondest wishes.
In 1794, the health of this eminent man began rapidly to decline, and a severe stroke of the palsy almost deprived him of the use of his limbs. His intellect still preserved its original activity, and he prepared for the press the last two volumes of his travels, which appeared in 1796, under the title of Voyages dans les Alpes. They contain a great mass of new facts and observations, of the last importance to physical science. He was in general a Neptunian, ascribing the revolutions of the globe to water, and admitting the possibility of mountains having been thrown up by elastic fluids disengaged from the cavities of the earth. In the midst of his rapid decline he cherished the hopes of recovery; but his strength was exhausted. He tried in vain to procure the re-establishment of his health; for all the remedies prescribed by the ablest physicians were wholly ineffectual. His mind afterwards lost its activity; and on the 22d of March 1799, he finished his mortal career, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. His life has been written by Jean Senèbier, entitled Mémoire Historique sur la vie et les écrits d'Horace Benedict de Saussure, Geneva, 1801; and his Eloge by Cuvier for the Institute in 1810, and for the Biographie Universelle.
Sauveur, Joseph, an eminent French mathematician, born at La Flèche in 1653. He was absolutely dumb until he was seven years of age; and even then his organs of speech were not so fully developed as to permit him to speak without great deliberation. Mathematics were the only studies he had any relish for, and these he cultivated with extraordinary success; so that he commenced teacher at twenty years of age, and rose so rapidly into vogue, that he had Prince Eugene for his scholar. He became mathematical professor in the royal college in 1686; and ten years
afterwards was admitted a member of the Academy of Sciences. He died in 1716; and his writings, which consist rather of detached papers than of connected treatises, are all inserted in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences. He was twice married; and by the last wife he had a son, who, like himself, was dumb for the first seven years of his life.
Savage, Richard, a man rendered famous by the singularity of his misfortunes, and by the elaborate life which Dr Johnson has written of him, was the son of Anne Countess of Macclesfield and of the Earl of Rivers, and was born on the 16th of January 1696-97. His mother, after a strenuous defence by her counsel, was convicted of adultery, and having thus separated herself from her husband the Earl of Macclesfield, she resolved to disown her unfortunate offspring, and treated him ever after with the most unnatural cruelty. (See Cunningham's edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets.) She delivered him to a poor woman to educate as her own, and after a vain endeavour to send him secretly to the plantations, she had him apprenticed to a shoemaker. Savage having discovered some letters which revealed to him his birth and the cause of its concealment, he became suddenly dissatisfied with the situation of a shoemaker, and resolved to solicit his unnatural parent for the means of pursuing a more distinguished career than had hitherto been afforded him. But he could neither soften the heart of this woman nor open her hand. Having received a tolerably good education, and being endowed by nature with a turn for poetry, he wrote Woman's Riddle and Love in a Veil, which, if they did not bring him much money, at least brought him friends. He next wrote the tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury, which brought him in a sum of £200. But Savage was a bad manager, and was ever in distress. He next published a volume of Miscellanies, and was on the fair way to fame, when he was suddenly condemned to be hanged for having killed a man in a drunken frolic. Despite his mother's anxiety to have the sentence of the law carried into effect, he was at last pardoned by the intercession of the Countess of Hertford. He now had his revenge upon his mother, by publishing his poem of the Bastard, 1728, which displays such an exalted tone of thought, an energy of expression, and a refined severity of sarcasm, which places it considerably ahead of his other writings. At last interest prevailed over maternal affection, and she resolved to allow him a pension of £200 a year. He was taken into the family of Lord Tyrconnell, with whom he lived for some time in the greatest amity. He wrote a poem entitled the Temple of Health and Mirth, in 1730, on the recovery of Lady Tyrconnell from a languishing illness; he dedicated, in strains of the highest panegyric, a poem called the Wanderer, in 1729, to his noble benefactor. A poem on the birthday of the Queen, entitled the Volunteer-Laureate, and written in 1731-32, brought him a pension of £50 a year, but her death, on the 20th November 1737, deprived him of all hopes from the court. But the friendships of Savage were not generally of very long duration. He suddenly quarrelled with Lord Tyrconnell in 1735, which again set him adrift penniless upon the world. His friends now resolved to procure him permanent relief, and he was accordingly despatched into Wales, where he was to live the rest of his life in quiet retirement, at the rate of £50 a year. Whether it was that the destitute and profligate life which he had lately led had unconsciously enchanted him, or, what is more probable, that he entertained secret longings after that distinction to which he felt his birth entitled him, he, at all events, resolved to deceive his friends, by simply retiring to write another tragedy, and again return to London to bring it upon the stage. He at length reached Swansea, where, after living about a year, he returned to Bristol, on his way to London. While in Bristol he was feasted and caressed for a time, and money was even raised
to carry him to London, but Savage had the misfortune to weary out his Bristol friends. His clothes were worn out: his appearance was shabby: his presence was disgustful. He was at last thrown into prison for a debt of £8, which he owed to the mistress of a coffee-house. Here, notwithstanding much kindness, he chafed and pined away, till at last, being seized with a fever, he expired on the 31st of July 1743, in the forty-sixth year of his age. He was buried on the 2d of August, in the churchyard of St Peter, Bristol, adjoining the gaol, where his remains rest without any external mark to indicate them.