198 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



important epoch it marked in our knowledge of terrestrial 

 magnetism. 



In the accomplishment of this plan, which, so far as we know, 

 originated entirely with Humboldt, he had two difficulties to 

 contend with the one arising; from his relationships with 

 England, and the other out of the position in which he stood 

 to Gauss. It might, indeed, be said that he was in no way 

 an enthusiastic admirer of the British nation. He had too 

 long been accustomed to the charm of the unrestrained and 

 intellectual society of Paris, not to view with the eye of a 

 satirist the stiff, formal conventionalities of English society. 

 ' This England is a detestable country,' he wrote to a friend at 

 Berlin after a visit across the Channel ; ' at nine o'clock you 

 must wear your necktie in this style, at ten o'clock in that, 

 and at eleven o'clock in another fashion.' One is irresistibly 

 reminded of the French caricature of ' Monsieur 1' Anglais,' who 

 invariably enacts the same heavy part. The egotistical cha- 

 racter of English politics was equally repellant to the German 

 idealism of Humboldt ; who does not remember his sarcasms 

 upon the 'land of the leopard' with its 'mercantile avarice,' 

 and punctilious church-going, in the sincerity of which he was 

 perhaps as little inclined to believe as Lord Byron himself? 

 To these difficulties were added some of a purely scientific 

 character. Everyone is aware of the high regard in which 

 Humboldt was held by the most distinguished men of science 

 in England, by whom, indeed, his name was scarcely less 

 honoured than by the savants of France and Germany, in sup- 

 port of which may be adduced the letters of Sir John Herschel ; 

 while Humboldt, on the other hand, was not less fully imbued 

 with a just admiration for the character as well as the labours 

 of such men as Faraday, Herschel, Sabine, Darwin, &c. Not- 

 withstanding, he was impressed with the conviction that he 

 should never succeed in enlisting the sympathy of the British 

 public. To the English, in their intense love of the practical, 

 by which they are led to seek points of reality even in the 

 ideal, the advance made by science in her most direct and ap- 

 preciable form was ever more attractive than the less obvious 5 

 though not less genuine, progress made through the introduc- 

 tion of newer and grander views of nature. Among a people 



