

FROM ACCESSION OF FREDERICK WILLIAM IV. TO 1848. 303 



both at home and abroad, is yet leaving this world without the ! 

 public acknowledgment and recognition of scientific men im- I 

 plied by the dignity of a professor's chair. My complaints are I 

 levelled against Government and public opinion ; to you I would 

 repeat my thanks for your noble readiness ever to render help 

 and protection to the distressed.' At length, in the following 

 March, Eisenstein was unanimously elected a member of the 

 Academy of Sciences of Berlin ; the previous year he had been 

 chosen a member of the Royal Society of Gottingen, without, as 

 Humboldt expressly assuredSchulze, the exertion of his influence. 

 The occasion gave him an opportunity to read his young friend 

 a moral lesson upon this proof of his personal merit, and he re- 

 marked to him : ' There is nothing more certain in this world 

 than the harvest to be reaped from intellectual labour.' His 

 endeavours were next directed towards securing for his protege-, 

 whom he describes, in April, as ' pale as death and on the high 

 road to consumption,' the honour of corresponding member of 

 the Institute. He requested Gauss, when an opportunity pre- 

 sented itself, ' to speak a good word for his young friend at 

 that Capital of the West.' Before this scheme could be carried 

 out, the sad event so long expected took place. Towards the 

 end of July, Eisenstein was seized with violent hemorrhage, and 

 conveyed to a hospital. In writing to Dirichlet on the 28th 

 of the month, Humboldt remarks : ' I am sending him this 

 evening, out of my limited means, a provisionary gift of twenty 

 gold Fredericks to help towards his nursing. I shall write a 

 friendly and flattering letter to Herrvon Raumer, which I shall 

 scarcely regard as an effort if I can only be of use to Eisenstein.' 

 A sojourn of a year in Sicily was recommended by the medical 

 men as indispensable for the recovery of their patient. ' It may 

 possibly be all in vain,' laments Humboldt in a letter to Johannes 

 Schulze of August 3, while begging for further assistance, 

 4 but it is worth while to make the effort for one whom Gauss 

 describes as a mathematical genius, such as appear only once or 

 twice in a century. In him was exhibited an active mind in a 

 sickly body, a wonderful creative faculty with a life passed 

 wholly amid sorrow.' Upon his return from a summer excur- 

 sion with the king, Humboldt's ' first thought was naturally 

 directed to Eisenstein.' He himself wrote to the Minister of 



