384 NINETEENTH CENTURY. pt. ill. 



published in 1790, which first led naturaHsts to consider the 

 question. Goethe's work was very little read at first, and 

 he had great difficulty in finding a publisher for it, for it was 

 thought that a poet could not know much of science ; 

 but the great Swiss botanist, Auguste de Candolle (born 

 1778, died 1 841) seeing what a new light it threw upon the 

 study of plants, taught it in his works, and then it became 

 gradually known as one of the greatest discoveries in modern 

 botany. 



Alexander von Humboldt studies the Lines of Equal 

 Heat over the Globe— Founds the Study of Physical Geo- 

 graphy—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 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 Uni- 

 verse.' 



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 

 he was ninety years of age. In the sixty-six years between 

 these two dates he collected and published in popular 



