annex and exploit are still
to that degree savages. Creation is still going on, and this earth is
becoming better and more beautiful as men work in line with reason and
allow science to become the handmaid of instinct.

Humboldt, above all men, prepared the way for Darwin, Spencer and
Tyndall--all of these built on him, all quote him. His books form a mine
in which they constantly delved.

Humboldt in boyhood formed the habit of close and accurate observation,
and he traveled that he might gratify this controlling impulse of his
life--the habit of seeing and knowing. His genius for classification was
superb; he approached every subject with an open mind, willing to change
his conclusions if it were shown that he was wrong; he had imagination
to see the thing first with his inward eye; he had the strength to
endure physical discomfort, and finally he had money enough so he was
free to follow his bent.

These qualifications made him the prince of scientific travelers--the
pioneer of close, accurate and reliable explorers.

* * * * *

Before Humboldt's time travelers had been mostly of the type of Marco
Polo and Sir John Mandeville, who discovered strange and wondrous
things, such as horses with five legs, dogs that could talk, and
anthropophagi with heads that grew beneath their shoulders. The
temptation to be interesting at the expense of truth has always been
strong upon the sailorman. Read even the history of Christopher Columbus
and you will hear of islands off the coast of America inhabited
exclusively by women who had only one calling-day in a year when their
gentlemen friends from a neighboring island came to see them.

The world needed accurate, scientific knowledge concerning those parts
of the world seldom visited by man. Travel a hundred years ago was
accompanied by great expense and more or less peril. Nations held
themselves aloof from one another, and travelers were looked upon as
renegades or spies.

Alexander von Humboldt had explored deep mines, climbed high mountains,
visited that strange people, the Basques of Spain, got little glimpses
into Africa where the jungle was waiting for a Livingstone and a Stanley
before giving up its secrets. The Corsican had thrown Europe into a
fever of fear, and war was on in every direction, when in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety-nine Humboldt ran the blockade and sailed out of the
harbor of Coruna, Spain, on the little corvette "Pizarro,