an repose safe from seizure, in
the rocks, in the sand, or in the torrent. Not a star can twinkle in the
abyss of night, but science will tell its rate of light, and describe
its silent and mysterious orbit. Torrid heat, the earthquake, the
tornado, the pestilence, mountains of ice, craters of flame--science
will dare them all, to know one more law of nature. God speed the daring
of science, if only her votaries will not place the law in the place of
Him who made both it and the works which it was commissioned to guide.
Science, when she has found the highest and the most comprehensive law
of nature, has not touched Deity itself; she has but touched the hem of
the garment of the Great Lawgiver.

One veteran of science, Alexander von Humboldt, has yielded to the great
law of humanity, as inexorable as any that he found in nature. His
researches in South America, though mainly confined to the valley of
the Oronoco, were most thorough, and his array of facts and observations
are of inestimable value. Yet, Humboldt searched into nature with the
coldness of the anatomist, content with examining its material
structure, rather than with the zeal of one who seeks images of Divine
power impressed alike on solid rocks and gliding streams. Science,
however rigid, would not have restrained the ardor of homage to the
Author of creative energy and grandeur, bursting forth irrepressibly in
scenes where angels would have adored the Great First Cause, and where
man can do no less.

Humboldt's fame as an observer is founded on a rock which no mortal
power can shake. He lacked the reverential insight into the higher and
deeper powers of nature, but, so far as his mental eyes saw, he
described surely and vividly the manifestations of those powers. He was
an observer of wonderful skill in the outer courts of nature, though he
seemed either not to seek or to be bewildered in seeking her interior
shrine. He exemplified rather the talent than the genius of discovery,
the patient sagacity which accumulates materials, rather than the fervid
enthusiasm which traces the stream of nature's action to its spring, the
great Creative Will. Yet, the very title of Humboldt's great work, the
concentrated fruit of a life of toil, 'Cosmos,' meaning beauty and
order, and, then, the visible world, as illustrating both, seems to show
a gleam of feeling above the spirit of material research. His warmest
admirer could have respecting him no worthier hope than t