2 5 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ADELBERT VON CHAMISSO AS A NATURALIST.* 



By Peof. EMIL DU BOIS-KEYMOND. 



TT is one of the lamentable consequences of the rapid expansion 

 -A- of human knowledge in this century that, while the power of 

 comprehension and the adaptability of individuals continue essen- 

 tially the same, the division of knowledge and mental labor is 

 ever increasing. The paths which scholars and investigators fol- 

 low are constantly becoming narrower, tending toward more con- 

 tracted goals, and more distinctly separated ; and in our histori- 

 cal view of recent times we regretfully miss such Briarean giants 

 as he whose memorial day we are celebrating. Men like Leibnitz 

 not only give by their wide vision and comprehensive power a 

 conception of the human intellect in its highest manifestations ; 

 not only does a mutual fructification of different departments of 

 knowledge take place in their minds through the meeting of differ- 

 ent views ; not only do they form, like an academy, a bond of 

 union between accomplished labors in widely separated regions of 

 knowledge ; but, while they extend its efficacy in many directions 

 more accessible to the common people, they create a wider par- 

 ticipation in it than had formerly been given. In their person, 

 mankind honors science ; and they therefore endure in the general 

 recollection as memorial stones of human progress after the waves 

 of oblivion have long surged over the names of the makers of the 

 most meritorious single investigations. Let us not delude our- 

 selves. The only member of the Physico-mathematical Section of 

 the Academy to whom a public monument has been erected, Alex- 

 ander von Humboldt, owes that distinction not to the professional 

 efforts by which his memory is kept alive in these halls, but to the 

 grand recollections which his eloquent pictures of nature, the in- 

 spiration toward the true and the good that radiated from him, and 

 his incomparable world-survey, have heaped around his name. 



A second member of the Physico-mathematical class is shortly 

 to be commemorated by a monument in one of the public places 

 of our city a man who, while his fame can not be measured with 

 that of Humboldt, is comparable with that eminent prototype in 

 the universality of his mental interests, the diversity of his work, 

 and the place which he occupied as between two nations our Adel- 

 bert von Chamisso. It is not, however, as a naturalist and trav- 

 eler that Chamisso is to receive a monument, but for his other 

 talents and excellences. We, his successors in this body, can not, 

 however, refrain from recollecting on this occasion the side by 



* Address delivered in the Berlin Academy of Sciences on the anniversary of Leibnitz's 

 birthday, June 28, 1888. 



