238 
the expense of the individual Colleges, has long been a 
favourite project with academical reformers, yet no one 
yet appears to propose any more radical scheme than an 
augmentation in the number of University Professors, and 
a diminution in the influence of College tutors. Against 
any such scheme, however carefully elaborated, there arise 
the old objections that an improvement in the mechanism 
of teaching is not the main reform of which the Uni- 
versities stand in need, and that the endowment of more 
teachers will not remedy the crying evil which has so la- 
mentably hindered the advance of purely scientific investi- 
gation in this country, The circumstance that the Universi- 
ties are comparatively poor, while many of the Colleges are 
very rich, and an awakening conviction that the Colleges 
exist for the Universities, and not the Universities for the 
Colleges, would seem to have suggested the above pro- 
posal : whereas the smallest historical knowledge of the 
objects with which the Colleges were originally founded, 
would reveal the curious circumstance that the first bene- 
factors had a truer conception of the manner in which 
knowledge ought to be endowed, than have the modern 
recipients of their benefits. Nothing can be more certain, 
though nothing is more frequently denied by those whose 
duty it is to be better informed, than that the majority of the 
great Colleges were not founded to be boarding schools 
for teachers and students, subordinate to the University 
curriculum, but to be homes at the central seats of 
learning, where life-long students might be supported 
while acquiring all the knowledge of the age, and aug- 
menting the store of learning which they had there in- 
herited. According to the old Oxford tradition, she 
could boast in the fifteenth century before there was ever 
a wealthy College that she had thousands of students 
living in hundreds of private halls. Many of the early 
Colleges did not include at allin their arrangements those 
whom we should now call Undergraduates, some of those 
which did do so allowed for a teaching staff independent of 
the body of Fellows, and it is within modern memory that 
many Colleges have had more Fellows than Under- 
graduates on their books. All these facts, and there are 
many similar ones, go to prove decisively that, in the 
language of Mr. Mark Pattison, “the Colleges were in 
their origin endowments not for the elements of a general 
liberal education, but for the prolonged study of special and 
professional faculties by men of riper age: and that so 
far from it being the intention of a Fellowship to support 
its holder as a teacher, it was rather its purpose to 
relieve him from the drudgery of teaching for a mainten- 
ance, and to set him free to give his whole time to the 
studies and exercises of his faculty.” The wish of the 
Founders, that is to say, when harmonised with the wants 
of the present age, and interpreted into the language of 
modern science, was to afford the means of living and 
the instruments of work to those who pledge their lives to 
the unremunerative task of scientific investigation, and 
original research. 
Surely then, if the influential and wealthy members of 
our Universities have at heart the real interest of their 
Institutions, or retain any veneration for the express 
intentions of their benefactors, they should not be the last 
to join in the patriotic object of raising the scientific 
reputation of this country, and increasing in manifold 
unseen ways the elements of our national greatness, C. 
NATURE 
| us two volumes. The third volume of the original, which 
-second volume, the comprehensive catalogue of his pub- 
[uly 24, 1873 
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT 
Life of Alexander von Humboldt, compiled by F. Lowen- 
berg, Robert Ave-Lallemant, and Alfred Dove. Edited 
by Professor Karl Bruhns. Translated by J. and C. 
Lassell. 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1873.) 
E cordially welcome this» admirable translation of — 
the only biography of A. v. Humboldt that 
has yet appeared possessing any authentic or scien- 
tific value. Humboldt’s own definitely expressed aversion 
to biographical notices, whether in regard to himself or 
his friends, the fact of his having outlived nearly all his 
blood-relations and the greater number of the contem- 
poraries of his earlier working years, together with other 
causes, combined, for a time, to retard the appearance of 
a trustworthy life of this remarkable man. 
The want of such a work was, however, strongly felt, 
and at the Congress of Astronomers convened at Vienna 
on Sept. 14, 1869, in honour of the centenary of A, vy. 
Humboldt’s birth, Dr. Karl Bruhns, Director of the 
Observatory at Leipzig, laid before the meeting the 
prospectus of a Scientific Biography of their great 
countryman, for which he demanded their active co-ope- 
ration. The result of this appeal and of his own editorial 
labours, was the appearance last year, in Germany, of 
the work of which the present excellent translation gives 
consists of critical véswsés by various writers of the 
state of different branches of the physical and natural 
sciences, with notices of Humboldt’s contributions to each, 
has been omitted by the translators, on the ground that 
the facts were treated of with sufficient minuteness in the 
general biography. On less good grounds, as it appears — 
to us, they have also omitted from the last section of the 
lished writings, of which upwards of 600 are enumerated 
in this list. 
Humboldt’s life, like the work devoted to its exposition, 
resolves itself into two distinct parts or periods. The 
first of these is characterised by intense and incessant 
activity in the acquisition of knowledge, the second by 
the quiet mature elaboration of the results of earlier 
study and observation ending in a thirty years’ term of 
comparative stagnation under the depressing influences 
of honorary court servitude. 
Alexander v. Humboldt was born at Berlin, in 1769, 
and together with his elder brother Wilhelm, was pre- 
pared under excellent private tutors for his university 
career at Frankfort, A. O., where he matriculated in 1787, 
He had already then shown that craving for the accumu- 
lation of facts which he retained to his latest years, and 
from his boyhood had been distinguished for his love of 
observing and collecting natural history objects, and his 
inaptitude for acquiring the exact classical scholarship — 
for which his brother evinced such marked ability. 
Botany was Alexander’s first love, and the earliest of his 
voluminous literary productions was a treatise in French 
which appeared anonymously at Berlin, in 1789, in the 
Gazette Literaire, entitled, “Sur le Bohon-Upas, par un 
jeune Gentilhomme de Berlin.” This composition was, 
however, rapidly followed by papers on the flora and 
geology of the Rhine lands, and other districts which he 
visited in the course of the few short intervals of cessation 
