FROM ACCESSION OF FREDERICK WILLIAM IV. TO 1848. 307 



6 1 have conceived the mad notion of representing in a 

 graphic and attractive manner the whole of the physical aspect 

 of the universe in one work, which is to include all that is at 

 present known of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, from the 

 nature of a nebula down to the geography of the mosses clinging 

 to a granite rock. With every grand and important idea must 

 be given the facts upon which it rests. The work must repre- 

 sent an epoch in the intellectual development of mankind, in 

 other words in the history of science. ... In every specific 

 branch of science detailed numerical results are to be given, 

 -as in Laplace's " Exposition du Systeme du Monde "... while 

 the scope of the work is not to be confined to a Description 

 of Terrestrial Phenomena, but is to include both the Heavens 

 and the Earth the Universe.' ! In these few sentences, ex- 

 tracted from the programme communicated to Varnhagen in 

 1834, we have a graphic outline of ' Cosmos : ' universal range 

 of subject, knowledge derived only through phenomena, that 

 is to say, experiment and induction, attempts at accuracy 

 of detail, historic research, in an attractive literary form. 

 With a combination of pride and modesty, the position allotted 

 to the work is at once indicated : it is to represent an epoch in 

 the history of science ; as a scientific work of ephemeral value, 

 but imperishable as an historic record. Were the plan of such 

 a work really but the ' mad notion ' of an individual to whom 

 it suddenly occurred one beautiful October morning in the 

 year 1834, we should have been obliged to confine our atten- 

 tion to watching the development of that plan during the 

 eleven years that elapsed before the publication of the work, 

 and to investigating how far it realised its bold pretensions. 

 But we have already seen, and the author of ( Cosmos,' 

 4 during the declining years of his eventful life,' emphatically 

 declared that the plan of the work ' had floated in his mind, 

 in an indefinite form, for more than half a century.' A 

 literary production of this character, which has engrafted 

 itself into the intellectual life of the present century, and for 

 the compilation of which material had been gradually amassed 

 during two generations, can only be fully appreciated when 



1 ' Briefe an Varnhagen,' No. 16. 

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