EAKLY HOME. 31 



idea that presented itself before him had been worked out 

 in his own mind and thoroughly appropriated.' Alexander, 

 on the contrary, could only master his daily tasks by dint of 

 extraordinary effort. As a boy, he was much less robust than 

 William, and suffered from an amount of debility which not 

 unfrequently produced great prostration. He himself confesses 

 to Freiesleben, his fellow-student at Freiberg and subsequently 

 Director of Mines, ' that in the first years of his childhood his 

 tutors were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intel- 

 ligence would ever be developed in him, and that it was only 

 in quite later boyhood that he began to show any evidence of 

 mental vigour.' l 



In reference to this subject, the following passage, occurring 

 in a letter written by George Forster to Heyne, on July 14, 

 1790, is full of interest: < Herr von Humboldt, who desires 

 to be specially remembered to you, is still with me, and has 

 been tolerably well throughout the journey, though not so well 

 as I could wish. He says, indeed, that he has been constantly 

 ailing for the last five years, and is never much better excepting 

 immediately after a severe illness ; then he gradually becomes- 

 worse again until the outbreak of another attack of indisposi- 

 tion, when the system is for a time freed from the accumulation 

 of unhealthy humours. I am, however, fully persuaded that in 

 his case the body suffers from a too great activity of mind, and 

 that his brain has been sadly overworked by the logical course 

 of education adopted by the Berlin professors.' 



And again, in a letter of later date, Forster writes to Jacobi 

 on August 6, 1791, in a similar strain: < Alexander von 

 Humboldt is at Freiberg, and I am afraid I shall lose sight of 

 him. William has been lost to me for long ; he is at Erfurt, 



1 As if for consolation, history furnishes many examples of the late 

 development of some of the finest intellects, which then seemed only to 

 expand the mere suddenly and the more gloriously. Albertus Magnus, the 

 learned philosopher of the middle ages, was as a child so dull of understand- 

 ing that he appeared incapable of learning to read ; the genius of Newton 

 lay for a long time so entirely concealed that his mother took him away 

 from school and destined him to agricultural pursuits ; Linnaeus, for the 

 same reason, was intended by his father to be apprenticed to a shoemaker ; 

 Moliere learnt to read only in his fourteenth year. The case was scarcely 

 so desperate, however, with Alexander von Humboldt. 



