29^ Baron Humboldfs View of the scientific Researches 



into them the aid of modern knowledge, new instruments, new 

 methods, and views founded on the analogy of facts already 

 known. It is also by a community of interests, that, launched 

 once more into the career of travels, I have thought it right to 

 adorn my discourse with names which are dear to science. After 

 having admired the riches of the mineral kingdom and the won- 

 ders of physical nature, we love to celebrate (and it is an agree- 

 able duty in a foreign land, and in the midst of a listening as- 

 sembly,) the intellectual riches of a nation, the labours of men 

 useful and disinterested in their devotion to the sciences, who 

 either travel through their country, or in solitude prepare, by 

 calculation and experiments, the discoveries of future generations. 



If, as we have proved by recent examples, the vast extent of 

 the Russian empire, which exceeds that of the visible part of 

 the moon, requires the concurrence of a great number of observ- 

 ers, this same extent presents also advantages of another kind 

 which have been long known to you. Gentlemen, but which, in 

 relation to the actual desiderata of terrestrial physics, do not 

 appear to have been generally enough appreciated. I will not 

 speak of that immense scale on which, from Livonia and Fin- 

 land to the South Sea which washes Eastern Asia and Russian 

 America, we may study, without going out of the empire, the 

 stratification and formation of rocks of all ages, — the spoils of 

 marine animals which the ancient revolutions of our planet have 

 engulphed in the bosom of the earth, — the gigantic bones of 

 terrestrial quadrupeds whose congeners are lost, or live only in 

 the tropical regions. I will not fix the attention of this assem- 

 bly on the aid which the geography of plants and animals (a 

 science scarcely yet blocked out,) will some day derive from a 

 more profound and specific knowledge of the climateric distri- 

 bution of organized beings, from the happy regions of the Cher- 

 sonesus and of Mingrelia, — ^from the frontiers of Persia and 

 Asia Minor to the sad shores of the Frozen Sea. I shall con- 

 fine myself at present to those variable phenomena whose regu- 

 lar periodicity, confirmed by the rigorous accuracy of astrono- 

 mical observations, will conduct directly to the discovery of the 

 great laws of nature. 



If they had possessed in the school of Alexandria, and at the 

 brilliant epoch of the Arabs, (the first masters of the art of ob- 



