the French 1789. This people believes in inheritance and hierarchy, and while no other excels it in power and glory, it esteems itself as a nation and not as a people. As a people, it readily subordinates itself, and takes a lord as its head; the workman lets himself be despised; the soldier puts up with flogging. It will be remembered that, at the battle of Inkermann, a sergeant. who, as it appears, saved the British army, could not be mentioned by Lord Raglan, because the military hierarchy does not allow any hero below the rank of officer to be mentioned in dispatches. What we admire before all, in an encounter like Waterloo, is the prodigious skill of chance. The night raid, the wall of Hougomont, the hollow way of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon, Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening him all this cataclysm is marvelously managed.

Altogether, we will assert, there is more of a massacre than of a battle in Waterloo. Waterloo, of all pitched battles, is the one which had the smallest front for such a number of combatants. Napoleon's three-quarters of a league. Wellington's half a league, and seventy-two thousand combatants on either side. From this density came the carnage. The following calculation has been made and proportion established: loss of men, at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent.; Russian, thirty per cent.; Austrian, forty-four per cent. : at Wagram, French, thirteen per cent.; Austrian, fourteen per cent.: at Moskova, French, thirtyseven per cent.; Russian, forty-four per cent.: at Bautzen, French, thirteen per cent.; Russian and Prussian, fourteen per cent.: at Waterloo, French, fifty-six per cent.; allies, thirty-one per cent. : -total for Waterloo, forty-one per cent., or out of one hundred and forty-four thousand fighting men, sixty thousand killed.

The field of Waterloo has at the present day that calmness which belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains; but at night, a sort of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveler walk about it, and listen and dream, like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18th lives again, the false monumental hill is leveled, the wondrous lion is dissipated, the battlefield resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate on the plain; furious galloping crosses the horizon; the startled dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of bayonets, the red light of shells, the monstrous collision of thunderbolts; he hears, like a death groan from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom battle. These

shadows are grenadiers; these flashes are cuirassiers; this skeleton is Napoleon; this skeleton is Wellington; all this is nonexistent, and yet still combats, and the ravines are stained purple, and the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds and in the darkness, while all the stern heights, Mont St. Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit, seem confusedly crowned by hosts of spectres exterminating one another.

Chapter xv. complete. From "Cosette » in Les Miserables."

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

FRIEDRICH HEINRICH ALEXANDER BARON VON HUMBOLDT

(1769-1859)

UMBOLDT was past seventy when he set himself seriously to the completion of the greatest work of his life,- his "Cosmos," and he succeeded so well that the world at once accepted it as one of the greatest masterpieces of civilization. It has not lost in reputation with the passage of time. The severity of thought required to follow Humboldt's reasoning does not make an intellectual diversion of reading the "Cosmos," but Humboldt had neither the desire to be entertaining nor the faculty of being so. In 1794 he wrote for Schiller's "Die Horen,» an allegorical essay, "The Rhodian Genius," in what is an unmistakable attempt at high literary form. It is, perhaps, the only one Humboldt ever made, and it will not detract from his great reputation as a scientific teacher to confess the melancholy nature of its failure.

He was born at Berlin, September 14th, 1769. After study at Frankfort on the Oder, Göttingen, and other universities, he began a systematic attempt to acquire a juster and more comprehensive view of nature than was exhibited in the writings of the scientists and philosophers who had preceded him. The natural German tendency to lofty metaphysical exploration of the unseen universe, he steadfastly resisted. The "Cosmos" he explored was the humble world of the visible, and he counted nothing in it too low to be without infinite significance. When at last he realized his idea in the "Cosmos," not only Germany, but all Europe, honored him as no scientific investigator had been honored since Newton. He deserved it, for if he made no astonishing actual discovery, he discovered new continents of possible achievement for those who were to carry on his work after him.

MAN

THE

HE general picture of nature which I have endeavored to delineate would be incomplete if I did not venture to trace a few of the most marked features of the human race, considered with reference to physical gradations to the geographical distribution of cotemporaneous types-to the influence exercised upon man by the forces of nature, and the reciprocal, although weaker action which he, in his turn, exercises on these natural forces. Dependent, although in a lesser degree than plants and animals, on the soil, and on the meteorological processes of the atmosphere with which he is surrounded- escaping more readily from the control of natural forces, by activity of mind and the advance of intellectual cultivation, no less than by his wonderful capacity of adapting himself to all climates—man everywhere becomes most essentially associated with terrestrial life. It is by these relations that the obscure and much-contested problem of the possibility of one common descent enters into the sphere embraced by a general physical cosmography. The investigation of this problem will impart a nobler, and, if I may so express myself, more purely human interest to the closing pages of this section of my work.

The vast domain of language, in whose varied structure we see mysteriously reflected the destinies of nations, is most intimately associated with the affinity of races; and what even slight differences of races may effect is strikingly manifested in the history of the Hellenic nations in the zenith of their intellectual cultivation. The most important questions of the civilization of mankind are connected with the ideas of races, community of language, and adherence to one original direction of the intellectual and moral faculties.

As long as attention was directed solely to the extremes in varieties of color and of form, and to the vividness of the first impression of the senses, the observer was naturally disposed to regard races rather as originally different species than as mere varieties. The permanence of certain types in the midst of the most hostile influences, especially of climate, appeared to favor such a view, notwithstanding the shortness of the interval of time from which the historical evidence was derived. opinion, however, more powerful reasons can be advanced in support of the theory of the unity of the human race, as, for

In my

instance, in the many intermediate gradations in the color of the skin and in the form of the skull, which have been made known to us in recent times by the rapid progress of geographical knowledge- the analogies presented by the varieties in the species of many wild and domesticated animals — and the more correct observations collected regarding the limits of fecundity in hybrids. The greater number of the contrasts which were formerly supposed to exist have disappeared before the laborious researches of Tiedemann on the brain of negroes and of Europeans, and the anatomical investigations of Vrolik and Weber on the form of the pelvis. On comparing the dark-colored African nations, on whose physical history the admirable work of Prichard. has thrown so much light, with the races inhabiting the islands of the South Indian and West Australian archipelago, and with the Papuas and Alfourous (Haroforas, Endamenes), we see that a black skin, woolly hair, and a negro-like cast of countenance are not necessarily connected together. So long as only a small portion of the earth was known to the Western nations, partial views necessarily predominated, and tropical heat and a black skin consequently appeared inseparable. "The Ethiopians," said the ancient tragic poet Theodectes of Phaselis, "are colored by the near sun god in his course with a sooty lustre, and their hair is dried and crisped with the heat of his rays." The campaigns of Alexander, which gave rise to so many new ideas regarding physical geography, likewise first excited a discussion on the problematical influence of climate on races. "Families of animals

and plants," writes one of the greatest anatomists of the day, Johannes Müller, in his noble and comprehensive work, "Physiologie des Menschen," "undergo, within certain limitations peculiar to the different races and species, various modifications in their distribution over the surface of the earth, propagating these variations as organic types of species. The present races of animals have been produced by the combined action of many different internal as well as external conditions, the nature of which cannot in all cases be defined, the most striking varieties being found in those families which are capable of the greatest distribution over the surface of the earth. The different races of mankind are forms of one sole species, by the union of two of whose members descendants are propagated. They are not different species of a genus, since in that case their hybrid descendants would remain unfruitful. But whether the human races