law. It is there, as everywhere, a shield to the innocent and an avenger of the wronged. Science and art, invention and industry, bring forth their contributions to the general good, and are sure of their rewards. Religion rears her temples without restraint, and dedicates them for all time to the service of the one living and true God. Civilization puts on a new light, and seems fast approaching the reflection of heavenly things. Christianity holds on her bright and widening way, and when the impartial historian shall hereafter from his serene throne trace the causes that led that wonderful race up the stupendous heights of their brilliant culture, intelligence, morality, and freedom, chief among the sources of their greatness will be marked the wisdom and beneficence of their systems of law. And while that historian, touching the people of these United States, shall speak of their national greatness and security, their civil liberty, and the tranquillity of their society; of the protection afforded among them to private rights; of the increase and diffusion among them of intelligence and wealth, and of the manly tone of their moral sentiment and energy, he will admit that these were the grand elements moved and influenced by their forms of polity and their principles of law; and that the definite standards of right which those principles established, coinciding with the dictates of Christianity, taught them, as a people, to ascend from the grosser inducements of natural inclination to that rectitude and morality which have exalted the American nation to the highest rank of the civilized world.

ART. V.-ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND HIS COSMOS. Cosmos a Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. By ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. Translated from the German by E. C. OTTE, B. H. PAUL, and W. S. DALLAS. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1850-1859. THE conflict between natural science and the Christian faith is waning. Meeting on the basis of a compromise obtained on the one hand by a corrected Scripture philology, and on the other by an abatement of some scientific pretensions and conclusions which had been carried too far, particularly in geology, these two are now found to be essentially in unison. The one is a complement of the other; each wrong in excluding, and only just to itself in affirming the other. Faith can lend to science its sweet trust and hopes, and science in return can give its clear insight and its truths to faith, and both thus find their appropriate place and function in the life of

the individual no less than in institutions. This concord is the outgrowth of two ideas, which are to-day too firmly established in the Christian consciousness ever to be other than important factors in existing as well as all future culture. One of these ideas is, that nature and revelation, or God in his works and in his word, must harmonize, and hence, that the purely scientific conclusions of the one, fairly though independently reached, must be in accord with. a fair interpretation of the other. The second idea is, that the world was made for man; in which, still further, two things are implied: first, that all the uses of nature are servants of man's physical, intellectual, and moral needs; secondly, that it is mainly by means of the mathematical and physical sciences that man is to pass from his present severe bondage to the labor of supplying his natural necessities, up to that lordship of nature which the steady progress of science and the useful arts now assure us of as the fulfillment of the primal command given to the race at the beginning, to subdue the world and have dominion over it. In this view, physics and theology touch each sympathetically in the sphere of the religious life, which as ever, and to-day more than ever, serves itself from the empiric sciences.

in one.

Humboldt was the representative man of the age in the department of the natural sciences. He was empiricist and philosopher He loved the solid facts; from them he strove to read the law, and then to ground both law and fact in some higher, more comprehensive unity of law or fact. He was unsurpassed for careful, thorough observation, power of combination, range of scholarship, a keen faculty for noting resemblances and differences; which qualifications place him beyond all question as a representative man in natural science, whose business is with matter in its forms and laws, and not with its genesis nor with the moral and religious aspects of natural truths. Analytic, like Aristotle and Bacon, he tends to the individual, the phenomenal, and develops the ideas in them; then, sympathetically and poetically, he seeks from them to build up an organic whole; not reconstructing nature as the rational cosmologists have been trying to do, with only small success as yet, but describing nature in its own coherence, transcribing it according to the chapters and subdivisions found written in itself. He studied nature after the method of Bacon, but was far superior to him in scholarship, and in the reach and precision of his investigations. From Thales to Leibnitz, and later still, facts have often been used as a sort of spring-board for mental gymnastics, as an arena for a metaphysical pirouetting. Theories of the world-formation, and of the on-goings of nature, have been constructed from a narrow basis

of facts, or from the mere insight of the reason, which in their logical manipulation have fallen into the grotesque or false, of which abundant examples he who wishes can find in the old philosophies lying dead and useless now, like philosophic fossils of ideal worlds. We have no intent to disturb these, only referring to them at the suggestion of the contrast between some deformed, half-mythic ancestor, and the robust, promising child of modern thought, the Cosmos.

Throughout his long life Humboldt was the child of a rare good fortune. His eminent position in science was partly due to the accidents of noble birth, wealth, court patronage, and influential friends. That great men, as the world calls them, are the creatures of circumstances, are the product of other than native-born forces, is but the complement of the truth that men are makers of their own fortunes. No enthusiasm nor iron will can wholly dispense with the aid of circumstances. These make and mar, push and postpone: in the poetic symbolism of the Greeks they were blessed gods. It is he who is planted on the "rim of the rising tide" that is borne to the highest success. For Humboldt there was a concert of propitious circumstances such as rarely falls to the lot of any individual; the most favored of mortals in science since the days of Aristotle, with whom he shares the honor of having admiring friends, kings, and kingdoms as tributary to the enriching of themselves, and of the world through them.

Alexander Von Humboldt was born in Berlin, September 14, 1769, a year often noted as memorable for the birth of quite a constellation of distinguished men, among whom were Cuvier, Canning, Wellington, and Napoleon, whose biographies form a large part of the science, literature, politics, and military history of the last seventy years. Wealth and social position freed his childhood from want and toil, and surrounded him with the means and incitements to scholarship; parental care kept him from the baser vices of youth; men eminent alike for their fine qualities of head and heart and scholarship were the teachers of his boyhood. The fine social influences of Berlin were all at his command. Campe, the translator of Robinson Crusoe, apart from the routine of text-books, fed the imagination of the growing boy with romances of foreign travel. A Doctor Heim taught him botany, according to Linnæus. Some years later he outgrew and then refashioned that science of Latin names. So, fortunately for himself, for the world, for his fame, his pursuit of knowledge was made under the rarest facilities. He is said in early life to have acquired so slowly, in comparison with his brother William, that at one time both mother and teacher

despaired of his success as a student. His after life, so splendid in results, suggests, not the old fable of tortoise and hare, but the fact of sturdy labor transmuting itself into genius. In the University at Gottingen, his good star, as usual, in the ascendant, he enjoyed the personal intercourse among others of Blumenbach, famous in natural history, of Heyne, the archæologist, Eichhorn, the historian, and George Forster, a companion of the ill-fated Captain Cook, a bold, versatile, and brilliant man, and of much influence on him in favor of the natural rights of man. At the University his side. studies were mainly in natural history. In 1792, having been appointed director of the mines in Franconia, he threw himself with his wonted energy into the study of the plants in the neighborhood, to experimenting in chemistry, metallurgy, and to writing for scientific journals. Such a young man could not dawdle away his time over the sentimentalism of the Sorrows of Werther, or lounge in the day and debauch at night. To him it would have seemed lost time to build "Chateaux in Spain." He must be prying into the organic structure of plants, into geology, chemistry, reforming the methods of mining, brooding over the laws of nature and winning her secrets from her, and devising schemes of foreign travel. The serene stars, cloud-mountains in the sky, a grove, a waterfall, tropic palms, and mountain flowers, and all the forms of majesty and beauty in nature intoxicated him. Nature has a potion for her lovers that exhilarates beyond the influence of any wine that ever came from the belly of grapes, that gives an ecstacy second only to that of the trances of Socrates, Behmen, and other "dreamers," who nevertheless in their dreams lived a more real life than if they had digged for gold, or made a fortune by speculating in stocks. His burning passion to see strange lands was gratified by the five years' journey (1799-1804) to South and Central America and the United States. in company with Aimé Bonpland, a distinguished naturalist. The rich fruits of this journey appeared in a noble edition of twentyeight volumes, accompanied by maps and engravings, in bringing which before the public the best French and German artistic and scholarly talent were employed for many years. It would have been suggestive of human progress to have placed this colossal work side by side with the crack publications of the Augustan age of Roman literature, and still more richly suggestive to have examined their contents. Still the work was too heavy for general use; "in ponderous continuity, but with diminishing celerity, folio after folio, quarto after quarto, dropped from the press." Labor was his habit, a second and improved nature. Take a brief summary of his and Bonpland's labors in that five years' journey. They analyzed the

He traveled

air on mountains, in valleys, and perilous craters; made numberless geological, astronomic, barometric, and magnetic observations; determined and corrected altitudes and geographical distances; mapped localities and the course of rivers; examined mines, volcanoes, and the tracks of earthquake shocks; botanized; gathered geologic and other specimens, and grammars of the native languages; studied and recorded the antiquities, habits, customs, agriculture, trades, language, history, politics, and physiology of the nations they visited. Of their endurance of hunger, cold, heat, and toil, of dangers from savage beasts and still more savage men, they do not complain, and we take no account.

Such great and varied collections had never before been brought into Europe from foreign lands. Humboldt took up his abode in Paris in order the more successfully to work out the results of that and other short journeys, by aid of men eminent in the sciences, who at that time were to be found in Paris. Of like beneficial results, particularly in the establishment of magnetic observatories in Europe, Asia, and Australia, was the journey to the Ural and Altai Mountains in 1829. On his return in 1830 he fixed his residence at Berlin, at the urgent solicitation of the Prussian government, which was proud of him and jealous of his living in other countries. After this he made occasional scientific, literary, political, and semi-political visits to divers persons and places, and in 1843 began to write the Cosmos, which was finished in 1858. This work is a resumé of the progress of the natural sciences, the net result of his own scientific labors, extending beyond a period of seventy years; years of the world most noted for the cultivation of science, literature, and all the various forms of industrial and scientific activity. The work is also the praiseworthy and magnificent endeavor to describe the universe as a harmoniously ordered whole, to bring its manifold diversity of phenomena under the unity of general laws. It was intended as a legacy, and by the author's death has become as it were the last will and testament of the author to man in general, and to the German nation in particular.

Cosmos is a happily chosen word for the title of the work, and it bristles with suggestions of labor and learning and aesthetics. It has a history, and Humboldt gives it; for he is not averse to an etymological search, knowing that a single word is sometimes a historic gem, a social picture, the food as well as the vehicle of thought. Eastward in the old Sanscrit it appears as the "purified;" westward among the Hellenes as an "adornment," "order," "rhetorical ornament.' With Pythagoras it was the "order in the universe," the 'universe" itself, the "totality of all things" in heaven and earth