Besides numerous memoirs scattered through various scientific journals, he published his Critical History of Geography and the Progress of Astronomy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1836-9).

We have spoken almost entirely of Humboldt's public and acknowledged services to science and the known features of his life and character; but of his more private history much remains unknown to the world, and to be collected only from the recollections of those with whom he was brought into contact. To gather up such reminiscences will be the worthy task of his biographer. We are, however, able to mention one characteristic trait of his private life-his always ready and generous encouragement of rising merit in younger cultivators of science, and (as an instance) we have been informed, on good authority, that the first living chemist in Europe, Liebig, freely acknowledges that his whole success has been due to the early notice and encouragement thus extended to

him.

more

Among the honours and attentions which Humboldt received from the highest quarters few were signal or gratifying than the respect and esteem evinced during his visit to England in 1842, when in the suite of his sovereign he was present at the baptism of the Prince of Wales. His reception in the scientific circles, it need hardly be added, was not less marked.

At this period he was known to be engaged in preparing the publication of his great and final work, the appearance of which, in 1845, was recognised both by scientific and general readers as constituting a kind of epoch in this class of philosophical writing.

In tracing the preceding faint outline of Humboldt's earlier labours, we have seen them divided among a vast multiplicity of subjects, including every department of physical science and natural history. But all these varied and multifarious researches were not carried on without a unity of purpose and a connected design correspondent to the enlarged views with which they were undertaken, and the comprehensive spirit in which his philo

sophic mind was so amply prepared, by previous study, to contemplate the diversified yet intimately connected series of phenomena and assemblage of laws which nature everywhere presents to the study of a mind duly prepared to comprehend it.

In this point of view, the leading idea of his last and greatest work appears to have been all along present to his conceptions, and to have supplied the guiding principle and stimulus to his researches. And it is by a natural and obvious transition that we trace the course of his studies and compositions, in continuous procession from the diversified experiences of his travels to the collected and condensed generalizations of his later meditations -from the details supplied by his journals and memorials of active research into nature in her own haunts, to the conception and arrangement of the matured results of those profound thoughts in the composition of Cosmos.

In the evening of a long and active life,' Humboldt declares in his preface, I present the public with a work, the indefinite outlines of which have floated in my mind for almost half a century. On the mass of materials brought together by unprecedented toil, skill, and perseverance in the labours of his earlier life, he still exerted the same unwearied powers of arrangement, classification, and generalization to rear the edifice of a comprehensive system-designed to include, as he says, the phenomena of corporeal things in their general connexion -to embrace nature as a whole, actuated and animated by internal forces.'

He traces with admirable clearness the way in which each branch of science reacts upon, and unites itself to, others. For example, Botany, taken in its widest extent, leads the observer to visit distant lands and ascend lofty mountains, and thus to determine the laws of distribution of species over different regions, whether characterized by difference of climate from geogra phical position, or from difference of elevation in the same region. But then to understand the causes of this distribution, the laws of

climate, of temperature, of meteorology, connecting the phenomena of earth with those of ocean, and especially of air, must be equally taken into account. But climatology, again, is intimately connected with solar influence, with the rotation and revolution of the earth; and thus with astronomy. Terrestrial magnetism evinces a wonderful connexion with the whole range of magnetic and electric science, as well as with the mineral structure of the earth. Geology lends her aid to the determinations of the geodetical measurer, whose calculations, aided by astronomical observation, react on astronomy, in which the magnitude and figure of the earth are such important elements.

These are but isolated examples; yet they serve to illustrate the turn of thought which pervades the researches of Humboldt, and gives the clue to the whole design, and stamps the value of his labours.

The substance of the Cosmos, in the first instance, was given to the world in the form of a course of public lectures, both at Paris and Berlin (1827-28), but they were delivered wholly without notes; and the work, as it stands, was entirely composed in the course of the years 1843 and 1844.

The production of a man of such European celebrity of course attracted immediate notice in other countries; and within a year of its publication on the Continent, one English translation (though extend ing only to the first volume) had appeared (1845), followed in 1847 by the more complete one of General Sabine, which received the advantage of the author's revision; and more recently by that in Bolin's Standard Library-including the passages which, from whatever notive, had been suppressed in the Former.

Some supplementary additions, tarrying up the statements of the vork to the level of the most recent discoveries, have been since annexed by the author, on which it is believed he was engaged up to the period of his death.

On the sensation caused by that event (though from his great age it was naturally not unexpected),

we need not enlarge; nor on the funereal honours of the solemn procession, and service at the Dom Church in Berlin-attended by all the academic, civic, and clerical dignitaries, and even by royaltywhich preceded the final deposit of his remains in the family vault at Tegel (May 10, 1859), to which those of his elder brother Wilhelm had been some years before consigned.

In devoting a few concluding remarks to the subject of his latest and most masterly production, the Cosmos, we may briefly refer to the progress of the idea, as the author has himself in some degree indicated it. Its development in his own mind was clearly the legitimate crowning inference from the accumulated convictions of the enlarged study of nature under so many phases and aspects. But the original conception to which he has so appropriately affixed the designation (and which has now become a standard term in our philosophical language), has been traced up to its rudimentary origin in the ancient philosophy. The physical science of the ancients, even where it attained its highest development, was still but partial and desultory. It possessed but little of comprehensiveness or unity; nor could the nature of the methods then pursued lead to those higher generalizations, at once exact and extended, at once founded on precise data and embracing the widest enlargement of ideas, which the modern inductive philosophy has been enabled to reach. The best physical ideas broached by some of the ancient philosophers were purely conjectu ral, evincing the power of their individual minds to foresee truths afterwards to be demonstratively established, which to them were purely ideal.

The first use of the term 'Cosmos,' in the sense of the order of the world,' has been attributed to Pythagoras,but was certainly adopted by Plato and Aristotle; the former conceiving the whole universe as a living being, animated by a soul :κόσμος ζῶον ἔμψυχον. (Timæus, 30.) While in a yet more precise and positive form, the author of the treatise, De Mundo, long ascribed

:

to Aristotle (c. ii. p. 391), defines Cosmos to be the connected system of all things; the order and arrangement of the whole universe, preserved under the gods and by the gods.' But among the ancients the ideas of arrangement, order, and design in the material world, so far as any positive estimation of evidence went, were necessarily of the most limited description; yet it is very remarkable that when they launched on the wide sea of pure speculation, apart from mere details, they did in some few instances strike out views of so grand and comprehensive a character, that even Humboldt became, as it were, a disciple of their school, and adopted the brief expression of that conception as the title of his great and crowning work - the term KOSMO-the principle of universal and perpetual order, law, harmony, and reason pervading the material universe. Such conceptions broached by the ancients were in truth but philosophical dreams, which, nevertheless, like other dreams, sometimes chanced to be true.

But in the mind and under the hands of Humboldt the idea thus pregnantly expressed became fixed on the basis of demonstrative and inductive evidence, and assumed the rank and position of a distinct phi. losophical conclusion; a real and tangible result as definitively determined from the progress of high generalization, as any of the subordinate laws regulating the various portions of nature of which it is the paramount principle and aggregate expression.

The view which he took cannot be better or more comprehensively expressed than in the author's own eloquent words :

It is the idea, stamped with the same image as that which in times of remote antiquity presented itself to the inward sense in the guise of an harmoniously ordered whole, Cosmos, which meets us at last as the prize of long and carefully accumulated experience.

To acknowledge unity in multiplicity;

from the individual to embrace the whole; amid the discoveries of later ages to prove and separate the individual truths, yet not to be overwhelmed with the mass; to keep the high destinies of man continually in view, and to comprehend the spirit of nature, which lies

hid beneath the covering of phenomena; in this way our aspirations rise beyond the narrow confines of the world of sense..-(Introd. p. 5, 1st transl.)

When, towards the close of his life and labours, Humboldt received the highest scientific honour which our country can bestow-the award of the medal of the Royal Societyit was this crowning effort of his genius which, it was acknowledged, stamped such peculiar.value on his other labours: a view of the case which was emphatically enlarged upon at the time by a fellow-countryman well qualified to do full justice to the views of his great cotemporary the Baron Bunsen, who represented the venerable philosopher on that occasion, and who in his reply to the address of the President, emphatically observed—

Humboldt thought he could show why and how this world and the universe itself is a Kosmos-a divine whole of life and intellect; namely, by its allpervading eternal laws. Law is the supreme rule of the universe; and that law is wisdom, is intellect, is reason, whether viewed in the formation of planetary systems or in the organization of the worm.-Proceedings of the Royal Society: Anniversary, Nov. 30th, 1852.

It is clearly to be remarked-and the remark has been dwelt on by some in a tone of hostile insinuation,

-that Humboldt in this great work does not specifically introduce any discussion of the bearing of his views on final causes, or those higher contemplations which ought to arise out of such speculations. This is to a great extent true; but it must be considered that the less such specific conclusions are directly pressed upon the reader, the more forcible and irresistible is the conclusion which he cannot fail himself to draw, and which is rather involved in, and almost synonymous with, the assertion of universal law and order, and the immutable and endlessly ramified and profoundly adjusted chain of physical causation.

It is a common but mistaken practice, especially with English writers, to be so continually obtruding considerations of a theological kind into philosophical discussion, as to go far to vitiate the force of their own argument, by depriving the scientific evidence

DEEPER and deeper still, Mary Cave found herself engulphed in the whirlpool of political intrigue. Almost the only courtier of the Queen's party who united activity of brain to uncompromising resolution, who was capable of strong effort and sound reflection,unwarped and unfettered by the promptings of self-interest, she had insensibly become the principal link that connected the policy of Merton College with the wiser counsels of the King's honest advisers. It was no womanly office she thus found herself compelled to undertake. False as is the position of a mediator between parties neither of whom are essentially quite sincere, it becomes doubly so when that mediator is one of the softer sex. She must guide the helm with so skilful a hand, she must trim the boat with so careful an eye; she must seize her opportunities so deftly, or make them so skilfully; and through it all she must exercise so jealous a vigilance over her own weaknesses, and even her own reputation, distinguishing so nicely between public duty and private feeling-doing such constant violence to her own affections and her own prejudices-that it is not too much to say nothing but a woman is capable of reconciling all these conflicting necessities into one harmonious whole. Yet it is not womanly to encourage admirers up to a certain point, in order to obtain their secrets, and then make use of them for a political purpose; it is not womanly to promote likings and dislikings between individuals of opposite sexes, or otherwise, for the furtherance of a State intrigue; it is not womanly to be in correspondence with half a dozen ambitious and unprincipled men, some of them profligates whose very names in connexion with a lady were sufficient to blast her fair fame for ever; and it is not womanly to have but

one object in life, to which duty, inclination, happiness must be sacrificed, and that object a political

one..

Mary sat reading her letters on the very sofa that Bosville had oc cupied during his convalescence in Sir Giles Allonby's house at Oxford. It was a day off duty with the Queen, and she had come to spend it with her kind old kinsman and his daughter. The two ladies were alone; and contrary to their wont, an unbroken silence, varied only by the pattering of a dismal winter rain against the window, was preserved between them. Grace sat musing over her work, and seemed buried in thought. She looked paler and thinner than usual, and her eye had lost the merry sparkle that used so to gladden Sir Giles. It was less like her mother's now, so thought the old knight; and his heart bounded after all those years to reflect how that mother had never known sorrow, and had told him on her death-bed that she was sure she was only taken away because her lot in this world had been too happy.' Aye! you may well laugh on, Sir Giles, and troll out your loyal old songs, and drink and ride and strike for the King! Roystering, careless, war-worn veteran as you seem to be, there are depths in that stout old heart of yours that few have sounded; and when 'little Gracey' is settled and provided for, you care not how soon you go to join that gentle, loving lady, whom still see many you and many a night in your dreams, walking in her white dress in the golden summer evenings under the lime-trees at home; whom your simple faith persuades you you shall look on again with the same angel-face, to part from nevermore. And where is the Sadducee that shall say you nay?

Meantime, Sir Giles is drilling a newly raised levy of cavalry on