Humboldt' 8 Popular Lectures. Ill 



learned persons in the town. The King, the Royal Family, 

 the Court, the highest Aristocracy, attended regularly and 

 listened with the people, which shewed its pride in the 

 celebrated man, by its enthusiastic admiration. Here Hum- 

 boldt stood immediately before his fellow countrymen as an 

 intellectual giant and inexhaustible spring of mental riches. 

 Every one, even the lowest and most ignorant, heard his 

 name ; he was something wonderful, mysterious, and remark- 

 able, and they thronged to see the man who had discovered 

 a new world. His brother, William, wrote to a friend in 

 Vienna, who considered every intellectually uncommon de- 

 velopment as something demoniacal : — " Alexander is really 

 a ' puissance,' and has gained a new kind of glory by his 

 lectures. They are unsurpassable ; he is always the same ; 

 and it is still one of the principal features of his character to 

 have a peculiar timidity and undeniable anxiety in the mode 

 of his appearance." These lectures of Humboldt were also 

 new and remarkable, in respect of the position he took to- 

 wards the people. For, while other learned men, whose 

 social position is always higher than that of the people, 

 nearly all, in their scientific and academic pride, did not 

 deem it worth their while to disseminate their knowledge 

 among the people, whom it must ultimately most benefit ; — 

 while they generally keep their learning as the property and 

 mystery of a caste, and interchange it among themselves ; — 

 while they consider it degrading for a man of science to 

 popularise his knowledge ; — Alexander von Humboldt set 

 them the noble example, that a baron, a chamberlain, a privy 

 councillor, and confidential adviser of his king, did not con- 

 sider it beneath his rank and dignity to appear publicly as 

 the teacher of his favourite science. He shewed that a true 

 man of science does not attach himself to an exclusive caste, 

 and that all considerations of birth, rank, and title, are as 

 nothing in the high service of science. And thus Humboldt, 

 in the impulses of his heart and of his mind, fulfilled the 

 noble duty which the mentally-gifted man owes to his people, 

 of bestowing on them and instructing them with the rich 

 treasury of his knowledge and experience, thereby raising 

 them nearer to himself. — (Lives of the Humboldts.) 



