of science, and rendered himself for the best years of his life a slave to booksellers and engravers. In ponderous continuity, but with diminishing celerity, folio after folio, quarto after quarto, octavo after octavo, dropped from the press. In 1817 (as we find from an advertisement of that period), after more than twelve years of incessant labour, four-fifths of the publication were completed, and a copy of the part then in print cost, upon ordinary paper, one hundred pounds sterling. Since that time the publication has been more remitted ;-even now, more than forty years after the termination of the expedition, it continues incomplete-and will probably remain so.* The Baron's constitution had need have been a good one to withstand his exposure amidst the snows of the Andes and the swamps of the Orinoco; but it was doubtless more severely tried by the pains and anxieties of so protracted a literary labour.

The lesson is one too important to be lost. Life is too short and uncertain to encourage the undertaking of encyclopædiacal publications by individuals. There cannot be a doubt that what was truly valuable in Humboldt's investigations might have been comprised in a fifth, if not a tenth, of the bulk, and published within a proportionally smaller compass of time. If a traveller narrates circumstantially and faithfully what he has seen and observed, expresses his own opinions, draws his own conclusions, and refers generally to the writings of his predecessors, so as to facilitate a comparison, and to exonerate himself from a just charge of endeavouring to throw them into the shade, he does all that can reasonably be required of him. It may be left for other and systematic writers, or for himself, as a future and independent task when he changes the character of a traveller for that of a didactic author, to harmonize the entire body of scientific information to which he has contributed into a methodical whole: but first let him publish, speedily and at all hazards, what belongs to himself; otherwise, ere he has finished, he may have spent his life, or his fortune; or (as in the present case) his own labours may be anticipated by other travellers whom his example has encouraged, and whose publication has been more individual and less tardy. This error (as we consider it) applies most particu

* It seems, from the excellent new edition of Brunet (1842, vol. ii. p. 659), that the nineteenth livraison of the Geographical Atlas of the Voyage' was published as late as 1840; that the fourth volume of the Relation Historique' is still due; and that the Geography of Plants by Humboldt and Kunth, announced in 1827, has never yet appeared. Lest the omission should appear an intentional one, we ought to recall to mind the services of M. Bonpland, a meritorious naturalist who was united with Humboldt in his grand expedition, and to whose friendly perseverance our author was greatly indebted. Some of the strictly botanical parts of the work were brought out under his care,

larly

larly to the Relation Historique, or Personal Narrative, which was intended to bind together and harmonize the multifarious collection of astronomical, geographical, botanical, zoological, physical, antiquarian, political and commercial facts and investigations which the author was to distribute over so many volumes. But unfortunately and strangely, this Narrative was an afterthought, and being chiefly compiled from meagre notes, its volume is swelled by elaborate analyses of preceding and contemporary works, and even those of a date posterior to the journey of Humboldt, intermixed with learned dissertations on different branches of science.

We said of this work in a contemporary article of our Review (Q. R., vol. xxi. p. 320), that 'it exhibits an exuberance of style, and a weight of diction in treating of the most common occurrences, which could scarcely be tolerated if it were not for the solidity of the judgment and the justness of the conceptions;' but, on the other hand, that the author' is so deeply versed in the study of nature, and possessed of such facility in bringing to bear on every object that arrests his attention so vast a fund of knowledge, that we may say of him in physics, what was said of Barrow in divinity, that he never quits a subject till he has exhausted it.' This criticism and this commendation are, we think, equally applicable to Humboldt's later writings, with reference to which indeed we make these remarks on the history of his life.

Excepting a short journey to Naples with Gay Lussac and Von Buch in 1805 (the year after his return from America), his taste for travelling seems to have been controlled by circumstances for more than twenty years, eighteen of which he spent constantly in Paris, where he cemented his early friendship with a much younger, but even then eminent, philosopher, M. Arago, of which very many traces may be seen in the work before us. The choicest years of Humboldt's life, from thirty-five to fifty-five, were thus spent in a capital, and almost exclusively employed in editing his' Voyage.' The result was not only to deprive the world of much which he might have done had he been enabled to prosecute sooner and more effectually his early and continually cherished project of exploring the interior of Asia; but it was perhaps even injurious in some respects to his qualifications as an author. To dwell with incessant attention for twenty years upon the acquisitions made during five, cannot be esteemed a desirable arrangement. Especially since, from the form of publication adopted, a vast number of observations and of subjects of discussion came to be treated of in different divisions of the work-which occasions a perpetual

reference from one to the other, a continued struggle to present the same simple fact in several forms and under several aspects, and that tendency to make the most of trivial circumstances, already alluded to, which inevitably encourages a prolix and embarrassed style. Vivid description, close and convincing reasonings, and terse composition are not in general characteristic of Humboldt's writings; and the reason is, that when he ought to have written a single work, or at most two, he wrote an encyclopædia. Even his hand-writing bears testimony to the drudgery of continued labour for the press, and the minute conglomeration of half-formed characters betrays the secret of writing a volume with the least possible amount of muscular exertion.

What might not those twenty years have done for exploring other and equally (if not more) interesting regions, which he spent in toiling over and over the ground of his youthful travels. If instead of describing and re-describing his Cotopaxi, and Jorulio, and Teneriffe, he had explored the volcanos of Central Asia, never seen by geologist; if instead of dwelling so continually on his favourite Chimborazo (soon to lose the character of maximum elevation even in its own continent) he had attempted the heights of the Himalaya, posterity would have been more benefited, and his contemporary reputation would surely not have suffered. To the East his early studies, as well as his early aspirations, had been directed: he had made progress, as he tells us, in the Oriental tongues, and in the study of the history of those obscure, in some instances forgotten nations, whose literature and arts contributed so much to European civilization. Finally when, partially relieved from the trammels of his book, he undertook in 1828 a journey to Siberia, under the special protection of the Russian government, and with two companions worthy of him-Ehrenberg and Gustav Rose,-his procedure was far too rapid to be productive of any great results; for we find him carried over a space of about 11,000 English miles in nine months-in the course of which he had not touched on any of the more problematical ground which it is so important to geography and geology to explore.* The results, very interesting so far as they went, have already been distributed or repeated in at least four different works.†

It may be suspected too that our author, whilst acquiring a knowledge of the physical geography of these remote regions, has not paid so much attention to objects not less important, though near at hand. His early and cursory journeys in England, France, and Switzerland, the trip to Vesuvius in 1805, and his brief

*Humboldt, Asie Centrale, iii. 608.

Rose's Reise nach dem Oural. Ritter's Asien. Humboldt, Fragments Asiatiques. Humboldt, Asie Centrale.]

transit

transit through Spain on his way to America, are the only ones which we can collect from his writings (and he never omits an opportunity of specifying what he has personally seen) to have been made for the purposes of scientific observation, and these regions he surveyed in so general a manner that he almost invariably cites other writers for the authority of European facts. We learn from the work before us, what we always suspected, that though volcanic phenomena have obtained more of his attention than any others in geology, he has never visited Etna. Whilst we admire Humboldt's character, and most deeply respect his attainments, we cannot but cast a regretful retrospect on what he might have done, had he not devoted himself to raise a literary pyramid whose mass, like those of Egypt, should be itself a passport to immortality.

It is satisfactory, however, to add that the happy accident of a protracted life-protracted, as the Kosmos shows, to beyond the limit assigned by the Psalmist, without any diminution of mental power, or even a flagging of the indomitable perseverance and research of his earlier days, has well nigh compensated the world for the time expended in publication. Baron Humboldt has lived not only to enlighten the world by a series of original works, continued in tolerably rapid succession, and of which the latest, as we shall hope to show, is not unworthy of its predecessors, but he has been enabled to confer upon the sciences, to which he has all his life been devoted with a pure and disinterested attachment, other and great collateral benefits. His position in society enables him to be the friend and companion of the sovereign of his own country, and if his attendance on the King of Prussia has required some sacrifices of a scientific kind, these are probably compensated by the value of his political influence in the encouragement of the labours, and distinction of the merits of others. No human being breathes who is more free from personal jealousy and literary enmity than the Prussian philosopher. It may well be believed that he has not an enemy, and many are the warm friends whom his urbanity and generosity have attached to him. We shall have occasion to show in this article that he seems to feel more pleasure in claiming for others the reputation which he thinks they deserve, than in demanding honour for himself. Nor is his influence confined to his own country. Domesticated equally in Paris as in Berlin, two of the chief European Academies regard him almost as an oracle; and in States with which he has no connection his influence has, to our own knowledge, been efficiently exerted, not merely for the promotion of science, by making suggestions for carrying on

extended

extended schemes of observation, but with two at least of the most jealous governments of Europe in procuring personal favour, and the relaxation of political decrees, on behalf of persons engaged in scientific pursuits.

We turn then to the work immediately before us-the first volume of three which are intended to embrace a summary of physical knowledge as connected with a delineation of the material universe; for such, as well as we can define it, appears to be the scope of an undertaking, worthy certainly of this author's accurate and extensive acquirements and mature experience, with which he proposes to sum up the labours of an energetic and thoughtful life.

The scheme is great, and he does not disguise to himself its difficulty. The volume before us includes some comparatively short prefatory dissertations-and then Naturgemälde,' or a descriptive account of the material universe. The remaining two volumes are to treat of the ways in which the study of nature may be promoted and rendered attractive; the history of natural investigations, or the progress of the human mind towards the discovery of physical truths; and, finally, a systematic development of individual natural sciences. The first volume, which alone is published, includes in itself so wide a range, and treats of subjects so peculiarly fitted for Humboldt's genius,-(the pictures of nature)—that we do not fear any injustice to the author in treating of it separately.* Unfortunately for every reader it possesses neither table of contents nor index, and these deficiencies add considerably to the difficulty of our proposed task.

Of the prolegomena, or initiatory essays, we have not much to say. They consist in the first place of a preface-in the next, of a popular discourse on the pleasures and advantages of science -and the third is entitled an attempt to define the limits and materials of a physical description of the world.' In this triple preface, covering, with the notes, nearly eighty pages of the original, we find some repetition and a want of definiteness, together with a tendency to digression, which we think calculated

*We regret that the appearance of an English translation of the Kosmos undertaken by Colonel Sabine, with the concurrence of the author, has been anticipated by the publication of another translation in the form of Parts or Fasciculi. This translation may, we dare say, be, on the whole, decently executed, but we should much prefer, of course, a deliberate version bearing the guarantee of a name so eminent as Colonel Sabine's, and authenticated by Baron Humboldt's approbation. We hope and trust, therefore, that Colonel Sabine has not dropped his design. In our quotations in the present article, we have generally consulted the German original alone; but in the extracts from the first eighty pages of preliminary matter, reference has likewise been made to proof-sheets of the French translation, revised by the author himself, in which some modifications are noticeable.

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