EAELY HOME. 5 



torily proved, it is yet evident from authentic and circum- 

 stantial accounts that several of their ancestors were among the 

 bravest and best men of their time. 



Whether Heinrich Humboldt, who in 1442 was in possession 

 of a small farm at Grrunow, in the circle of Angermund, is to 

 be reckoned as one of the ancestors of the illustrious brothers, 

 is uncertain. There is, however, no doubt that one of their 

 immediate progenitors was Johann Humboldt, 1 who lived during 

 the most disastrous period of the Thirty Years' War, and died 

 as Burgomaster of Konigsberg, in the New Mark, on February 

 11, 1638, in the sixty-third year of his age. Of his son 

 Clemens great-grandfather of William and Alexander von 

 Humboldt the following particulars are gathered from the 

 unpublished Chronicles of the years 14001750 of Greorge 

 Christ. Gutknecht, pastor of Hermsdorf and Wulkow : 



6 Clemens Humpolt, Bailiff of NeuhofF, in the Electorate of 

 Brandenburg, died on the 2nd of January, 1650, and was, 

 together with his daughter, who died a few days afterwards, 

 conveyed in a hearse to Vircho, and interred in the church 

 there. In fulfilment of his wish, and at the request of his 

 widow, the funeral sermon, from 2 Timothy iv. 6, was printed 

 at Stettin. Being ambitious of a university education, he had 

 been sent to Frankfort, but at the end of a year was obliged, 

 owing to the troublous times consequent upon the war, to bid 

 farewell, nolens volens, to the University, since his father, 

 Consul at Konigsberg in the New Mark, had become so greatly 

 impoverished by the frequent quartering of soldiers, the in- 

 tolerable contributions laid upon him, and the robbery and 

 plunder consequent upon the passage of countless troops, that he 

 was unable to supply the young student any longer with the 

 sumptus necessarios for the prosecution of his studies. Mean- 



1 The names of various members of the Humboldt family occur in nume- 

 rous mortgage and other deeds belonging to the seventeenth century, proving 

 them to have been persons of consideration in the districts where they 

 resided. A descendant of a distant branch of the family is still living at 

 Berlin, so that Alexander von Humboldt was scarcely correct in speaking 

 of himself and his brother as ' long the last of their name/ ' My brother 

 and myself are the sole representatives of the name of Humboldt.' (' Briefe 

 von A. v. Humboldt an Varnhagen/ p. 113 ; ' Lettres d'Alexandre de Hum- 

 boldt a M. Aug. Pictet,' p. 181.) 



