The life of the philosopher has for some minds a higher charm than that of a poet—the life of a practical worker a greater attraction than that of a student or dreamer—the career of an earnest living reality more than that of a mystic, or even of a professor of the ideal. The career of the natural phenomenon, whose name heads this article, embraced to a great extent all of these conditions. Born in an age when the dawn of a new creation was already beginning to climb over the hills by which men's minds were environed—at a time when the rude disentanglements, by processes new and strange, were shortly to make themselves felt among the believers in an old faith—when the first throes of the great moral volcano of modern times seemed to indicate but feebly its future terrible force—the mind of young Rousseau buds forth like some fragile blossom of spring pushing its sensitive shoots through the frozen snow on the mountains around his native town.