164 Obituary Notice of Humboldt. 
. 
expositor. 
But if thus in some sense unjust to himself and to his high 
ealling, Brown could never be charged with the slightest injus- 
tice to any fellow-laborer. He was scrupulously careful, even 
solicitous, of the rights and claims of others; and in tracing 
the history of any discovery in which he had himself borne a 
sy he was sure to award to each one concerned his full due. 
f not always communicative, he was kind and considerate to all. 
To adopt the words of one of his intimate associates, ‘‘ those 
who knew him as a man will bear unanimous testimony to the 
unvarying simplicity, truthfulness, and benevolence of his char- 
acter,” as ‘‘the singular uprightness of his judgment.” 
The remaining, and the most illustrious name of all,—and one 
in its wide renown strongly in contrast with the last,—has only 
just now been inscribed upon our obituary list. 
The telegraph of the last week brought to us the painful in- 
telligence that the patriarch of science, the universal HuMBOLDT, 
died at Berlin on the 6th of May. Born in 1769, a year more 
— in great men than any equal period of all preceding time,* 
umboldt had, before the end of the eighteenth century, exhib- 
ited qualities of the very highest order, and obtained a place of 
acknowledged celebrity in Europe. This, however, was the mere 
prelude to his career, for with the close of that century he com- 
menced, with Bonpland, his wonderful exploration of Spanish 
America, which continued during five years. This journey must 
be considered in all future time as, substantially, the scientific 
discovery of Spanish America; and whether we measure its re- 
sults by the amount of knowledge through the wide fields of 
Astronomy, Geography, Geology, Mineralogy, Meteorology, Z0- 
ology, Botany, and Political Economy, or the personal qualities 
by which this knowledge was collected and sataned to its place 
in the records of science, we cannot hesitate to rank the expedi- 
tion amongst the most important and successful ever executed 
by man. 
On his return to Europe, in 1805, Humboldt was employed 
several years in reducing his immense collection of materials to 
form for publication. From that time to his death, a period of 
almost half a century, he resided (except for a short time, in 
__ ® Napoleon, Wellington, Mehemet Ali, Soult, Lannes, Ney, Castlereagh, Cha- 
Me an Bie Cuvier, and Humboldt. es sat of Metternich is sometimes en 
this list, probably incorrectly. — of Canning certainly does not belong here, 
nor that of Mackintosh, nor of Sir Walter Scott—Ebs. ] 
