May 23, 1859.] OBITUARY.— HUMBOLDT. 231- 



never played the courtier's part but in the hearty desire of attaining- 

 some good and noble end. His liberal opinions were indeed so well 

 known, that an occasional witty sarcasm on any monarchical abuse 

 was tolerated in him as coming from one who, he himself said, 

 was styled a French Jacobin. 



Visiting Prussia in 1840, eleven years after the Siberian journey 

 of Humboldt, and repeating my visits in each following year whilst. 

 I was exploring a great part of the empire of Eussia, I invariably 

 received from him the most important suggestions, as well as the 

 most marked attentions. The great traveller, having performed his 

 long journey in an incredibly short time, was well aware that he 

 had done little more than sketch out broad views of the geography, 

 natural history, ethnography, and terrestrial magnetism of the vast 

 regions over which he had passed, and consequently he much de- 

 sired that other men should solve various problems which he had 

 only time to touch. One of the largest of these problems that re- 

 mained to be worked out was the geological structure of Eussia ; 

 and when he saw the determination of my associate, De Verneuil, 

 and myself to endeavour to elaborate the true geological succession 

 of Eussia in Europe and the Ural Mountains, he took especial 

 pleasure in assisting us. In saying to me, " You will now be abla 

 to tell us the true age in the geological series of those sandstones 

 which occupy so vast a region in the ancient kingdom of Permia," 

 he gave me the first impulse to pursue researches in several of the 

 distant provinces of Eussia which ended in the establishment of 

 the Permian group of rocks, as the youngest of the palaeozoic for- 

 mations, and in my attaching to it a name which has now become 

 current in science. 



Again, in his luminous conversation and writings on the great 

 Aralo-Caspian depression of the earth's surface, he stimulated me to 

 those endeavours which showed how in that vast low region, the 

 physical geography of which he had described so well, the geologist 

 could bring forth evidences of a transition from a lacustrine con- 

 dition, through a brackish water period, into one of purely marine 

 conditions. 



With his views on the grandeur of the phenomena by which many 

 ancient igneous rocks, differing from the eruptions of mere volcanos, 

 have been extruded from fissures in the crust of the earth, and have 

 been spread out over vast spaces, I agree, in common with his 

 eminent friend M. Elie de Beaumont, as shown in my last Anniver- 

 sary Address. Assuredly no man of his generation had seen more of 



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