sight was wholly set upon it. As is the geometer who wholly applies
himself to measure the circle, and finds not by thinking that principle
of which he is in need, such was I at that new sight. I wished to see
how the image accorded with the circle, and how it has its place
therein; but my own wings were not for this, had it not been that my
mind was smitten by a flash in which its wish came.[47]

To my high fantasy here power failed; but now my desire and my will,
like a wheel which evenly is moved, the Love was turning which moves the
Sun and the other stars.[48]

JAMES DARMESTETER

(1849-1894)

A good example of the latter-day enlightened savant is the French Jew,
James Darmesteter, whose premature death robbed the modern world of
scholarship of one of its most distinguished figures. Scholars who do
noble service in adding to the sum total of human knowledge often are
specialists, the nature of whose work excludes them from general
interest and appreciation. It was not so with this man,--not alone an
Oriental philologist of more than national repute, but a broadly
cultured, original mind, an enlightened spirit, and a master of literary
expression. Darmesteter calls for recognition as a maker of literature
as well as a scientist.

The son of a humble Jewish bookbinder, subjected to the disadvantages
and hardships of poverty, James Darmesteter was born at Chateau-Salins
in Lorraine in 1849, but got his education in Paris, early imbibing the
Jewish traditions, familiar from youth with the Bible and the Talmud. At
the public school, whence he was graduated at eighteen, he showed his
remarkable intellectual powers and attracted the attention of scholars
like Breal and Burnouf, who, noting his aptitude for languages, advised
devotion to Oriental linguistics. After several years of uncertainty,
years spent with books and in travel, and in the desultory production of
poetry and fiction, philological study was undertaken as his life work,
with remarkable results. For twenty years he labored in this field, and
his appointment in 1882 to succeed Renan as Secretary of the Asiatic
Society of France speaks volumes for the position he won. In 1885 he
became professor of Iranian languages and literature in the College of
France. Other scholastic honors fell to him in due course and good
measure.

As a scholar Darmesteter's most important labors were the exposition of
Zoroastrianism, the national faith of ancient Pers