180 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



'Never have my expectations been raised so high by any 

 literary undertaking as they are by yours, in which, from the 

 intellectual powers employed, great results may be anticipated. 

 I am delighted to find that scientific investigation is not to be 

 excluded from your plan. Res ardua vetustis novitatem dare, 

 omnibus naturam et naturce suce omnia. 1 So long as the 

 present method of studying botany and natural history con- 

 tinues to be followed, in which attention is directed only to 

 the varieties of form, the physiognomy of plants and animals, 

 whereby the study of characteristic distinctions and the law 

 of classification is confounded with the true objects of science, 

 so long must botany, for example, fail to furnish a worthy 

 subject of speculation to thoughtful men. But you feel with 

 me that there is something higher yet to be attained, that 

 there is something even to be regained ; for Aristotle and Pliny, 

 whose descriptions of nature were addressed to the aesthetic 

 feelings, and were aimed at the cultivation of a love of ar^, 

 undoubtedly possessed a wider range of view than the modern 

 naturalist who contents himself with the mere registration of 

 nature. The universal harmony of form, the problem as to the 

 existence of a primeval form of plant which is now developed 

 in a thousand forms of different gradations, the distribution of 

 these forms over the surface of the globe ; the causes of the 

 various emotions of joy and sorrow produced upon the mind by 

 the varied aspects of the vegetable kingdom ; the contrast to 

 be observed between the dead immovable mass of rock or the 

 apparently inorganic stem of a tree and the living garment of 

 vegetable life by which it is clothed in beauty, just as the 

 flesh imparts a soft outline to the skeleton ; the history and 

 geography of plants, or the historical representation of the 

 general distribution of vegetation over the face of the earth, 

 a portion of the general history of the world hitherto unin- 

 vestigated ; the search for the oldest forms of vegetation as 

 imprinted on their stony sepulchres (fossils, coal, peat, &c.) ; 

 transformations in the earth's condition gradually fitting it for 

 the habitation of higher grades of life ; the characteristics of 

 plants and their migrations, both in groups and individual 



1 Plinii Hist. Nat., prssf. sect. 15. 



