OF BARON HUMBOLDT. 159 



THE COSMOS. 



IT has been already intimated that Humboldt 

 intended to publish the sixty-one lectures de- 

 livered in the winter of 1827-8, both in the uni- 

 versity and the music-hall of Berlin, relating to 

 Physical Cosmography, but that a variety of 

 circumstances compelled him to postpone this 

 project to some future day. He considered the 

 delivery of this series of lectures before a public 

 of varied degrees of intellectual development, a 

 means of ascertaining the relative connection of 

 the various branches of science, and for that pur- 

 pose he had previously delivered similar lectures 

 in Paris. He communicated his conception of 

 science on these occasions extempore and with- 

 out notes. Not before the year 1843-4, he 

 wrote down, for the first time, the substance of 

 these lectures, and, in doing so, he had to re- 

 gard the signal progress of science in the inter- 

 mediate period, and the rapid development, 

 maturity, and certainty in its varied branches. 

 But in order to give to his subsequent descrip- 



