22 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



Knowledge appeared in her most engaging form. Engel was 

 himself most truly a philosopher for the world, and without 

 doubt he was an admirable instructor of youth.' 



In the year 1785, as we learn from his biographer Gronau, 1 

 Dohm, then officially engaged in the Department of Trade and 

 Commerce, gave a series of lectures upon political economy, at 

 the request of the minister Von Schulenburg, for the instruction 

 of a young Count von Arnim. 



' At the wish of their excellent mother,' writes Gronau, ' the 

 two brothers William and Alexander von Humboldt attended 

 these lectures, which were in all points similar to an ordinary 

 university course, and were continued from the autumn of 1785 

 to June 1786.' 'Dohm retained through life the happiest 

 recollections of this early connection with his youthful auditors ; 

 and it is evident that Alexander von Humboldt also maintained 

 a strong interest in his former tutor, since after an interval of 

 twenty years, in a beautiful spirit of grateful affection, he 

 sought him out towards the end of the year 1806, and, for the 

 sake of doing him a trifling pleasure, devoted several spare 

 hours of a morning and evening to " his good tutor," as he 

 always called Dohm, in giving him a narrative of his travels in 

 America, illustrating his descriptions by an exhibition of some 

 of the treasures he had brought back with him.' 



It would appear that Alexander did not join his brother 

 William in attending the lectures on law and jurisprudence 

 delivered by Klein, Counsellor of the Supreme Court of Judi- 

 cature, and one of the compilers of the New Code of Law in 

 Prussia. Yet it is probable, from the interest that Moses 

 Mendelssohn is known to have taken 2 in the studies of William 

 von Humboldt, that there may be some truth in the tradition 



1 Gronau, ( Chr. Wilh. v. Dohm, nach seinem Wollen und Handeln,' 

 p. 127. 



2 In the private library of the King of Saxony there is still preserved a 

 very elaborate treatise of nearly 750 quarto pages, together with some 

 letters of Klein and remarks of Moses Mendelssohn upon ' extorted treaties ' 

 (' iiber erzwungene Vertrage '). A letter of Alexander von Humboldt, 

 appended to the book, runs as follows : 



* The book, entirely in my brother's handwriting, contains the essays which 

 he wrote out after every private lesson on the laws of nature from Counsel- 



