144 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



with such trivial reflections ? It is because the day after to- 

 morrow, the ninth of December, I cannot omit celebrating with 



f f O - 



some emotion an event the great importance of which is en- 

 tirely unaffected by any such chance. It is the day in which 

 you, my revered friend, will enter upon a period of existence 

 to which none of the present leaders of the exact sciences have 

 as yet attained, the day on which you will reach the same age 

 at which Newton closed his earthly career, on the 30,766th 

 day of his existence. And while at this period Newton's 

 powers were completely exhausted, you are, to the great delight 

 of the scientific world, still in the vigorous exercise of your 

 faculties.' 



A year later, amid the sufferings of his last illness, he consoled 

 himself under the fear that advancing age might bring an in- 

 crease of his malady by the thought of his Humboldt, an epithet 

 he was never known to apply to any other person. He repeatedly 

 read and caused to be read to him the last letter he had re- 

 ceived from Humboldt, which had given him extreme pleasure. 

 c I am grieved to hear,' wrote Humboldt on December 4, 1854, 

 c that your sufferings increase both in " number and intensity." I 

 beseech you in the name of all who have any concern in the 

 glory of Germany to do all you can for the preservation of the 

 powers still left to you. Alleviation is a measure of cure. He 

 who has achieved so many intellectual triumphs, who was the 

 first to impart certainty, order, and guidance to the language 

 of electricity, in which converse is now held across land and 

 water should not fail to find sources of mitigation in the con- 

 templation of all he has accomplished.' In addition to this 

 cordial acknowledgment of his unexampled achievements in 

 science, this exalted mind, to whom everything of mediocrity 

 was repulsive, dwelt with peculiar pleasure during these last 

 days upon a small correction Humboldt had ventured to intro- 

 duce in his translation of Arago's works, where, with the full 

 approval of Dirichlet, he had reduced the number of those whose 

 investigations had entitled them to be considered 'of true 

 mathematical genius ' from ten, as it stood in the original, to 

 eight. We learn, moreover, that the sufferer reluctantly put 

 away ' Cosmos,' as unable to afford him, in his religious needs, 

 the support of which he stood increasingly in want as death 



