reat heroes had
passed away.

In two congratulatory documents on the occasion of Moltke's ninetieth
birthday, Theodor Mommsen, the historian, has summed up the results of
the great soldier's life-work--in the address presented by the Royal
Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and in the honorary tablet of
the German cities. These inscriptions may be found in Mommsen's _Reden
und Aufsaetze_. Shortly after Moltke's death, in a commemorative
address at the same Academy, the historian and Hellenist Ernst Curtius
reviewed Moltke's relations to historical science and his achievements
in military science and in history. The Academy had appointed the
Fieldmarshal an honorary member in 1860 for his great achievements in
the military, geographical, and historical sciences. Professor
Curtius in the address draws the outlines of Moltke's character as a
student, and explains how he is indebted to the teachings of Karl
Ritter, the founder of scientific geography, how he clearly develops
under the influence of Niebuhr, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von
Buch, and Erman, the physicist. He points out how Moltke, as historian
and as an expert cartographer, introduces scientific spirit and work
into his great creation, the German General Staff. As a strategist,
however, it remains to be said that he follows in the footsteps, puts
into practice and develops the methods of General von Clausewitz, the
first mind who put war on an empirical and scientific basis. Moltke
was intimately acquainted with Gibbon through a nearly completed
rendering into German of _The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_, a translation which, unfortunately, never was printed
and seems to be lost even in manuscript. As his favorite books and
writers Moltke mentions, among others, Littrow's _Astronomy,_ Liebig's
_Agricultural Chemistry_, Clausewitz's _On War,_ Ranke, Treitschke,
Carlyle. It appears, then, that his scientific equipment was of the
most solid sort, enabling him to make the most valuable contributions
to knowledge.

It is impossible to imagine to oneself Moltke breaking into tears,
either of wrath or of despair, in great crises of his life, such as we
know to have been the case with Bismarck. There is a contrast between
these two men in their very makeup. There is tragedy in Bismarck's
soul, in its volcanic eruptiveness and its conflicts. He is nervously
high-strung in the extreme, the very embodiment, in Karl Lamprecht's
terminolo