Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. I HAVE with great diffidence ventured upon the following biographical sketch, based upon Professor Klenke's " Denkmal." My sole apology is that my humble effort to popularize the memory of Humboldt. has received encouragement from many men renowned in science—some of them personal friends of that illustrious man. I indulge the hope, however, that the interesting nature of the subject will go far to atone for my inadequate treatment of it. The reader will no doubt meet with many defects of style inseparable from efforts to think in one language and express those thoughts in another; and I therefore bespeak his indulgence for my attempt to write in a tongue I never learned from my mother's lips. To treat a great theme greatly, requires something of cognate greatness. To this I do not pretend. F. A. S. chapter{Section 4ALEXANDER YON HTJMBOLDT. OUR researches into the phenomena of the physical and the human cosmos present us with many curious parallels. In those two distinct, yet inseparably united realms, there are periods when the creative energies seemed to slumber, and periods when they seemed to manifest themselves in splendid and unwonted energy. Like the aloe, which, according to popular belief, flowered but once in a hundred years, then putting forth a blossom of marvellous beauty; so nature atoned for her seeming sleep by the creation of minds which became new vital forces in the world of man. One star did not rise alone in the twilight of heaven: great men dawned upon the world in constellations. Sometimes a decade of years saw the advent of those who were to give character to the century in which they lived. Sometimes a single year was marked in this way; and such was the year 1769. Between the chimes of its new year's morn and the last setting of...