PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 255 



13 individuals out of 325 returned alive, the unproductive 

 wanderings of Eequena to the Eio Napo and the Amazon, 

 and Loffling's botanical expedition to the coast of Cumana in 

 1751, we shall have enumerated nearly every effort that had 

 been made before Humboldt's time towards the scientific ex- 

 ploration of South America, while the published results were 

 represented by such works as Pater Grili's fabulous narrative 

 6 Orenoco illustrate,' Graulin's ' Historia corographica de la 

 Nueva Andalusia,' and Dobritzhofer's 'Greschichte der Abi- 

 pomer.' 



If further proof were needed of this distrust and suspicion, 

 we have only to call to mind that in the year in which Hum- 

 boldt was born, the English astronomers, desirous of observing 

 the transit of Venus, were refused a landing on the coast of 

 California, and that Malaspina was condemned to perpetual 

 imprisonment in return for the services he had rendered to 

 his Government. 



In contemplating Humboldt in the light of a traveller, it is 

 important to notice the comprehensive view of nature that 

 furnished in him the motive for travel, and led him to become 

 the originator of a new epoch in scientific exploration. While 

 earlier travellers seem merely to have been actuated by simple 

 curiosity, and to have regarded with equal interest everything 

 that came before them accumulating in a desultory manner a 

 large amount of heterogeneous information with which they 

 interwove minute details of personal adventure Humboldt 

 carefully avoided all reference to matters of personal detail, 

 and directed his attention mainly to the fundamental struc- 

 ture of the earth's surface, to the intimate relationship be- 

 tween all natural phenomena, and to the existence of a con- 

 nection between regions the most widely separated, thereby 

 proving the unity of nature. He was never satisfied describing 

 merely in a conventional manner the countries he visited ; he 

 preferred to collect data for the more complete development of 

 a science which before his time had been variously termed 

 Physics, the Theory of the Earth, or Physical Geography, but 

 of which till then the outlines had been but slightly sketched. 

 In 1796, he wrote to Pictet : ' I have been drawing up a scheme 

 for a universal science' (p. 197). The connection between 



