A still more remarkable instance of helpfulness in a wife is presented
in the case of Huber, the Geneva naturalist. Huber was blind from his
seventeenth year, and yet he found means to study and master a branch
of natural history demanding the closest observation and the keenest
eyesight. It was through the eyes of his wife that his mind worked as if
they had been his own. She encouraged her husband's studies as a means
of alleviating his privation, which at length he came to forget; and his
life was as prolonged and happy as is usual with most naturalists. He
even went so far as to declare that he should be miserable were he to
regain his eyesight. "I should not know," he said, "to what extent
a person in my situation could be beloved; besides, to me my wife is
always young, fresh, and pretty, which is no light matter." Huber's
great work on 'Bees' is still regarded as a masterpiece, embodying a
vast amount of original observation on their habits and natural history.
Indeed, while reading his descriptions, one would suppose that they were
the work of a singularly keensighted man, rather than of one who had
been entirely blind for twenty-five years at the time at which he wrote
them.
Not less touching was the devotion of Lady Hamilton to the service
of her husband, the late Sir William Hamilton, Professor of Logic and
Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. After he had been stricken
by paralysis through overwork at the age of fifty-six, she became hands,
eyes, mind, and everything to him. She identified herself with his work,
read and consulted books for him, copied out and corrected his lectures,
and relieved him of all business which she felt herself competent to
undertake. Indeed, her conduct as a wife was nothing short of heroic;
and it is probable that but for her devoted and more than wifely help,
and her rare practical ability, the greatest of her husband's works
would never have seen the light. He was by nature unmethodical and
disorderly, and she supplied him with method and orderliness. His
temperament was studious but indolent, while she was active and
energetic. She abounded in the qualities which he most lacked. He had
the genius, to which her vigorous nature gave the force and impulse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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