Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/169

Rh grasping the tragic fate of Calas, Sirven, and De la Barre, Humboldt in happier times only summoning his force to obtain a salary for poor Eisenstein, or to prosecute Haupt's appeal; the fame of both suffering from the fact that their teachings and discoveries having long ago become common property, only a few know whom to thank for them; finally, both in extreme old age glowing "with that youth which never forsakes us," and active to the latest breath; Voltaire busy with his "Irène" and the "Dictionnaire de l'Académie," Humboldt with the "Cosmos." What the "Experiments on Excited Muscular and Nervous Fibers" was for the youth Humboldt, and the "Travels" and "Views of Nature" for the man, the "Cosmos" was for the old man. We have already questioned the fundamental thought of this famous book from the point of view of theoretical natural history, and of the doctrine of the persistence of force. We have frequently entertained the query whether such a mixture of styles as rules in it is correct or not. It certainly is not becoming to the naturalist. But it is clear that it is exactly this form of representation that makes possible the immense influence of the book, that has over the whole inhabited earth prompted hundreds of thousands to join in asking questions they had not thought of before; that, particularly in Germany, lifted the ban under which natural science had lain in the ideas of the cultivated, as if it were a domain from which common men were excluded, and were accessible only to a few particularly qualified to enter it, and about which one need not be concerned unless he have some special inclination or calling for it. It has been remarked that by science the French understand only natural science, by Wissenschaft the Germans only mental science. Goethe's scientific efforts, in consequence of their semi-æsthetic character, their desultoriness, and the bitter hostility he showed to all associated research, could not change the case. If it is now different, and the state recognizes the full importance of science, it is, of course, immediately the result of the technical triumphs science has achieved. But the turn for the better we ascribe originally to the Cosmos-lectures, which, for the first time in Germany, led a cultivated German audience to imagine that there was something else in the world than belles-lettres and music, than the "Morgenblatt" and Henrietta Sonntag. And although Humboldt himself, as we have already said, did not rise to the very apex of science, it was, nevertheless, this less exalted height at which he stopped that permitted him to make himself comprehensible to the ordinary children of men.

While, indeed, he was not as sublime as Newton or Laplace, while he did not mirror one side of the world in absolute perfection like Gauss, he was able to make an entrance among the multitude for the truths discovered by those archangels of science. While he shared with them the universal human feeling for the beautiful in sublime things, he was incited to project a "picture of Nature," at the risk that