vels. He combined, in a degree perhaps never before equalled in one
individual, the most opposite and generally deemed irreconcilable
mental qualities. To an ardent poetical temperament, and an eye alive
to the most vivid impressions of external things, he united a power of
eloquence rarely given to the most gifted orators, and the habit of
close and accurate reasoning which belongs to the intellectual powers
adapted for the highest branches of the exact sciences. An able
mathematician, a profound natural philosopher, an exact observer of
nature, he was at the same time a learned statistician, an
indefatigable social observer, an unwearied philanthropist, and the
most powerful describer of nature that perhaps ever undertook to
portray her great and glorious features. It is this extraordinary
combination of qualities that render his works so surprising and
valuable. The intellectual and imaginative powers rarely coexist in
remarkable vigour in the same individual; but when they do, they
produce the utmost triumphs of the human mind. Leonardo da Vinci,
Johnson, Burke, and Humboldt, do not resemble single men, how great
soever, but rather clusters of separate persons, each supremely
eminent in his peculiar sphere.

Frederick Henry Alexander, Baron of Humboldt, brother of the
celebrated Prussian statesman of the same name, was born at Berlin on
the 14th September 1769, the same year with Napoleon, Wellington,
Goethe, Marshal Ney, and many other illustrious men. He received an
excellent and extensive education at the university of Gottingeu, and
at an academy at Frankfort on the Oder. His first step into the
business of life was as a clerk in the mercantile house of Buch, at
Hamburg, where he soon made himself master of accounts and
bookkeeping, and acquired that perfect command of arithmetic, and
habit of bringing every thing, where it is possible, to the test of
figures, by which his political and scientific writings are so
pre-eminently distinguished. But his disposition was too strongly bent
on scientific and physical pursuits, to admit of his remaining long in
the comparatively obscure and uninviting paths of commerce. His thirst
for travelling was from his earliest years unbounded, and it erelong
received ample gratification. His first considerable journey was with
two naturalists of distinction, Messrs Fontu and Genns, with whom he
travelled in Germany, Holland, and England, in the course of which his
attention was c