ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. i 53 



against the Hellenistic classicism of the preceding period that came in 

 with the national rising. 



Not that there were wanting voices to protest against the disorder, 

 or men who knew better, but who disdained to engage in contention 

 with persons talking like madmen. Germany could still boast of one 

 of the first mathematicians and mathematico-physicists of all time. 

 On his return, Humboldt had found the academy at Paris full of the 

 fame of the youthful author of " Disquisitiones Arithmeticae." Be- 

 sides Humboldt, there were then in Paris to save the reputation of 

 German science our Paul Erman, who received from the academy the 

 prize in galvanism founded by Napoleon, and whose anatomy of the 

 Echinoderms was also crowned by it, and pre-eminently Gauss. But 

 even Gauss illustrates how small a place science and mathematics had 

 in German ideas. Our pleasure in the dainty jest which Heinrich 

 Heine, in his " Reisebildern," utters against the scientists of Guttingen, 

 in the spcrtive parallel between Georgia Augusta and Bologna, is some- 

 what troubled when we remember that among those scientists was the 

 immortal Gauss. Never on a similar occasion would a young French 

 poet have overlooked the existence of Laplace. 



Finally, the revolution approached. " The brilliant and brief satur- 

 nalia of a purely ideal natural science," as Humboldt mildly described 

 it, was drawing toward an end. Natural philosophy had fulfilled none 

 of its glittering promises ; its draught, foaming and pungent at first, had 

 grown stale. And just as, two generations before, a race of poets and 

 thinkers had been produced all at once, so it happened, by a coinci- 

 dence so remarkable that we guess a law in it, that there arose at this 

 time a healthy and strong crop of genuine naturalists. There was, 

 however, another element by which the external fortune of German sci- 

 ence was henceforward materially affected. Frederick the Great had 

 kept the eyes of the world turned toward the capital of his monarchy 

 for half a century. By the calling of such men as Maupertius, Euler, 

 and Lagrange, he had given the Academy of Sciences, recently founded 

 by him, a temporary high luster, partly borrowed from abroad. A seat 

 of German intellectual life, Berlin did not become, under him. The 

 center of culture in Berlin lay in the French colony. If we abstract 

 Lessing's brief residence, Moses Mendelssohn, the prototype of his 

 Nathan, the correct, frigid Ramler, and the author of " The Joys of 

 the Young Werther," Berlin had, in the last century, hardly attained 

 any importance in German literature. 



That since then Berlin, having become the political capital of Ger- 

 many, has also pushed into the advance of the other German cities in 

 an intellectual respect, was not the effect of a single cause, nor the 

 work of any one man. Chief in the succession of circumstances that 

 contributed to it was unquestionably the creation of the University of 

 Berlin. The university could, indeed, not raise a new German Par- 

 nassus, even if the Berlin of that time had been the place for it ; and 



