Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/275

Rh earlier studies to devote his later efforts to making this field of linguistic research cultivable. He undertook to learn the Hawaiian language from the books which he had at hand, and assigned himself the task of preparing a grammar and dictionary of it.

We have thus gone around the circle of Chamisso's scientific work. From a profusion of single observations, remarks, and experiments only a small part of his peculiar activity can be illustrated here. Considering his activity as a whole, it must be conceded that his strength did not lie in the direction of strict theoretical analysis. This is not to be wondered at if we consider the condition of theoretical science in Germany at the time, when it was just beginning to recover from its enervating entanglement with philosophy. But the characteristic and really remarkable feature of Chamisso's scientific activity is his power of embracing the whole world of phenomena with the same love, freshness, and elasticity—from the stone that rung under his geological hammer; the hay, as he modestly named his dried favorites; the sea-worm, which revealed to him one of its most wonderful mysteries; to that noblest production of Nature, as man represents himself to objective research, whether considered as a single being related to the animals, as a tool-making, fire-using, social creature, or, in his highest expression of speech. With sound, lively sense, with always ready energy, Chamisso stands before the things of Nature, exercises unreservedly every kind of observation, and forms his conceptions without prepossession and with strict limitation to the actually known. He was thus, although his monographs may have been overtaken or his general views have fallen behind those of the present day, a complete naturalist in the best sense of the word, and that at a time when such men had to be looked for through Germany as with a candle.

Many of those who go by his marble image in the future will recall "Peter Schlemil," "Schloss Boncourt," and Salas y Gomez. A few will think of the botanist and ethnologist Chamisso, of the salpæ and the coral islands. Greeting from their inmost hearts the few will bow to him who like him, in an iron age, and in the midst of the striving after the real, have kept in disposition, fancy, and spirit a place for all that is of man, for the ideal, and the beautiful.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Deutsche Rundschau.