ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 155 



Jacobi ; and finally, yet remaining among us, the last of his race, 

 Herr Peter Riess ? It was a glorious time for German science, little 

 as a precocious and spoiled youth is wont to esteem the men who, 

 themselves almost without teachers, trained their teachers ; a time to 

 write whose connected history, the materials for which lie at hand in 

 numerous memorial addresses, would be a thankful task and a patriotic 

 duty ; for it was the time when the German nationality, to which so 

 much importance is now attached, grew strong in science also, to 

 proud independence. But the crowning was reserved for the epoch 

 in which Alexander von Humboldt exchanged his former residence in 

 Paris for Berlin. The Italian double-entry book-keeping, which he 

 had learned when young in the trade-school at Hamburg, enabled him, 

 as he told me, to observe how his originally quite considerable means 

 were wasting away in the sums which the publication of his travel- 

 work consumed. When this occasion compelled him, in obedience to 

 the wish of King Frederick William III, much against his inclination, 

 to remove to Prussia, we can only see in this turn of fortune the 

 fulfillment of his high calling, and in the epos of his " much-moved 

 life " admire the remarkable concatenation by means of which, during 

 Alexander's long absence, his brother William, by the foundation of 

 the Berlin University, had prepared a suitable location for his con- 

 tinued activity. 



It is hard in this all-leveling time to give an idea of the dominant 

 position that spontaneously fell to him here. In consequence of the 

 long depression of science in Germany and its contemporaneous bloom 

 in France, Paris was endowed in the eyes of German naturalists with 

 a luster of which the present generation knows nothing. We learned 

 from French text-books, we worked with instruments made in Parisian 

 shops, and a long residence in Paris was considered an indispensable 

 finish to a good scientific education. We may conceive, from this 

 consideration, what a halo would surround the head of a man who 

 had played such a part in Paris as Humboldt had done. He returned 

 home as a king comes back to his kingdom after a long campaign of 

 conquest, and was received by the circle of Berlin naturalists, which 

 had grown up in the mean time, as a prince is received by his magnates. 



We can more easily represent to-day the favorable circumstances 

 that assured to the brother of William von Humboldt his familiar 

 place in the highest circles of society and his relations to the court. 

 The Cosmos-lectures, the meeting of the German naturalists at Berlin 

 in 1828, the journey into Central Asia, made under the commission of 

 the Czar of Russia, pressed Alexander von Humboldt's figure before 

 the German public far in advance of that of any other scientific man. 

 His peculiar dependent-independent position between the court and 

 ministry ; the impregnable footing of scientific fame and unselfish 

 exertion on which he stood ; his profound knowledge of men and af- 

 fairs, and his perfect tact ; a power for work that was equal to numer- 



