148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



younger than Goethe by twenty, than Schiller by ten years, and yet 

 welcomed by both as if he were their peer in age. 



He figured as the friend of Willdenow, Georg Forster, and Leo- 

 pold von Buch, as the pupil of Blumenbach, Lichtenberg, and Werner, 

 already known by minor writings in which his industrious manysided- 

 ness had early displayed itself, already a much-traveled man according 

 to the ideas of the day, and, although of independent means, a servant 

 of the state, on the way to the highest honors. In what was he not 

 interested, and what did he not take up ? Ancient weaving, subterra- 

 nean flora, basalt, meteorological phenomena, the theory of logarithms, 

 had engaged him ; but, when it was worth while, he knew how to con- 

 centrate his strength upon a single point. Galvani's discovery had 

 recently stirred naturalists and physicians to effort. " In the fall of 

 1792, having become acquainted with it in Vienna, Humboldt, trav- 

 ersing Germany in every direction as a miner, physicist, and botanist, 

 'wandering upon desolate and remote mountains where he was some- 

 times cut off from all literary intercourse,' already revolving the plan 

 of his tropical journey in his head, had still found time to make thou- 

 sands of most delicate experiments. Even on horseback, besides ham- 

 mer, glass, and compass, he was never without 'his galvanic apparatus, 

 a pair of metal rods, pincers, a glass stand and an anatomical knife,' 

 and the curse which the Bolognan anatomist had invoked upon the 

 poor race of batrachians overtook them under Humboldt's hand, even 

 in places in which they had previously been secure from it." Now he 

 had talked with Alessandro Yolta, in his villa on the Lake of Como, of 

 the crucial experiment in animal electricity, Galvani's convulsion with- 

 out metals, and was preparing to collect the results of his investiga- 

 tions in the book on " Excited Muscular and Nervous Fibers." He 

 must confirm his own researches with experiments on frogs' legs, 

 and he opportunely called not only his brother, but also " Herr von 

 Goethe," to be his witnesses. 



Among the various individualities which were united in him into a 

 complicated whole, and which we meet in analyzing this being, is first 

 of all an artist. The " Rhodian Genius," the " Views of Nature," the 

 address at the opening of the assembly of naturalists, are art- works. 

 That work of Humboldt's which, like Goethe's " Faust," contemplated 

 from youth, was completed with an astonishing energy only in an ad- 

 vanced old age, may certainly claim to be an artist's production. We 

 shall for the present leave unanswered the question of the utility of this 

 kind of mingling of the poetic element with the scientific, in which we 

 may recognize a return to the models of Plato and Lucretius. Aside 

 from his native propensity, Humboldt was led toward it by the aesthetic 

 manner of thinking then prevailing in Germany, which had become a 

 second nature to him, and especially by his intercourse with our great 

 poets. It must not, however, be forgotten that something of the same 

 kind had been observed a little while before in France. Buffon's 



