CH. xxxvni. HUMBOLDT. 423 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 



SCIENCE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). 



Humboldt Lamarck Cuvier Geoffrey St.-Hilaire Comparative 

 Anatomy Development of Animals 'Homology' Cuvier's 

 Regne Animal ' ; His Restoration of Fossil Animals Von Baer 

 on the study of Embryology. 



Alexander von Humboldt studies the Lines of Equal 

 Heat over the Globe Pounds the Study of Physical 

 Geography Writes the 'Cosmos,' 1793-1859. While 

 Goethe was studying plants at Weimar, and learning the 

 secrets of Nature in the quiet of his own home, another man 

 of whom we must now speak was planning to travel in 

 distant countries, and to write a history, as far as he was able, 

 of the work which Nature is doing all over the world. 



Alexander von Humboldt, who forms a link between the 

 science of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was 

 born at Berlin in 1769, and was educated (together with 

 his brother William, the great philosopher and politician) at 

 the University of Gottingen. At the age of one-and-twenty 

 he went to Freyberg, where he was a pupil of Werner. It 

 was at this time, when he was only just of age, that he 

 formed the plan in his mind of spending his life in studying 

 the works of Nature, and writing a ' grand and general view 

 of the Universe.' 



The first sketch of his book, which he called * Cosmos,' 

 or 'The Universe,' was written in 1793, when he was only 

 twenty-four; and the last sheets were printed in 1859, when 



