Famous men of science / [Sarah Knowles Bolton].

  • Bolton, Sarah Knowles, 1841-1916.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Famous men of science / [Sarah Knowles Bolton]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT The great Agassiz, in his eloquent address, in Boston, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Humboldt, said: “All the fundamental facts of popular education in physical science, beyond the merest elementary instruc¬ tion, we owe to him. We are reaping daily in every school throughout the broad land, where education is the heritage of the poorest child, the intellectual harvest sown by him. “There is not a text-book of geography, or a school atlas in the hands of our children to-day, which does not bear, however blurred and defaced, the impress of his great mind. But for him our geographies would be mere enumerations of localities and statistics. He first sug¬ gested the graphic methods of representing natural phe¬ nomena which are now universally adopted. The first geological sections, the first sections across an entire con¬ tinent, the first averages of climate illustrated by lines, were his. Every school-boy is familiar with his methods now, but he does not know that Humboldt is his teacher.” Naturally we ask how such a man rose to fame, and what incited him to stand among the few intellectual leaders of the world. Frederick William Henry Alexander von Humboldt was born September 14, 1769, in Berlin, the same year as Baron Cuvier. Unlike Cuvier, he came into a home of wealth and culture. His father was a Prussian officer and chamberlain to the king. His mother, the widow of Baron von Hollwede, married Major von Humboldt