352 COSMOS. 



tliemselves in. tones, numbers, and lines.* The improvement 

 of an mteliectual instrument of research — analysis — has pow- 

 erfully accelerated the reciprocal fructification of ideas, which 

 is no less important than the rich abundance of their creations 

 It has opened to the physical contemplation of the universe 

 new spheres of immeasurable extent in the terrestrial and ce- 

 lestial regions of space, revealed both in the periodic fluctua- 

 tions of the ocean and in the varying perturbations of the 

 planets. 



RETROSPECT OF THE EPOCHS THAT HAVE BEEN SUCCESSIVELTl 

 CONSIDERED.— INFLUENCE OF EXTERNAL OCCURRENCES ON THE 

 DEVELOPMENT OF THE RECOGNITION OF THE UNIVERSE AS ONE 

 WHOLE.— MULTIPLICITY AND INTIMATE CONNECTION OF THE SCIEN- 

 TIFIC EFFORTS OF RECENT TIMES.— THE HISTORY OF THE PHYSIC- 

 AL SCIENCES BECOMES GRADUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH THE HISTa 

 RY OF THE COSMOS. 



I APPROACH the termination of my bold and difficult under- 

 taking. Upward of two thousand years have been passed in 

 review before us, from the early stages of civilization among 

 the nations who dwelt around the basin of the Mediterranean 

 and the fruitful river valleys of Western Asia, to the begin- 

 ning of the last century, to a period, therefore, at which gen- 

 eral views and feelings were already beginning to blend with 

 those of our own age. I have endeavored, in seven sharply- 

 defined sections, forming, as it were, a series of as many sep- 

 arate pictures, to present a history of the physical contem- 

 plation of the universe, or, in other words, the history of the 

 gradual development of the knowledge of the universe as a 

 whole. To what extent success may have attended the at- 

 tempt to apprehend the mass of accumulated matter, to seize 

 on the character of the principal epochs, and to indicate the 

 paths on which ideas and civilization have been advanced, can 

 not be determined by him who, with a just mistrust of his re- 

 maining powers, is alone conscious that the image of so great 

 an undertaking has been present to his mind in clear though 

 general outlines. 



At the commencement of our consideration of the period 

 of the Arabs, and in beginning to describe the powerful in 

 fluence exercised by the admixture of a foreign element in 

 European civilization, I indicated the limits beyond whict 

 the history of the Cosmos coincides with that of the physical 



• Wilhclm von Humboldt, GesammeUe Werke, bd. i., s. 11. 



