IT

THURSDAY, JULY 24, 1873

THE ENDOWMENT OF RESEARCH

III.

T is probable that though the main proposition here advocated, that original workers in the Sciences deserve, on public grounds, a recognised position and pecuniary support, will not meet with much opposition from any quarter, the means by which this desirable end is chiefly proposed to be attained will not be acquiesced in with equal readiness. Englishmen have been so long accustomed to regard their Universities as merely high schools of liberal education, and the independent growth of modern Science in this country has been so rapid and vigorous, that to many worthy persons it will seem nothing better than a Utopian dream to attempt to re-establish the genuine pursuit of scientific knowledge as an end in itself at our ancient seats of learning. Those, however, who know something about the system of a German University, and are acquainted with the former history of Oxford and Cambridge, will not consider the attempt to be of such a hopeless character. The present time also affords an admirable opportunity of urging upon public attention a fundamental reform in the direction above indicated. The Universities have of late years been losing many of the peculiarities which they once so warmly cherished, and at the same time their revenues have been increasing to an enormous extent. The same Government which passed a Bill to pronounce them national and not ecclesiastical establishments, has also issued a Royal Commission to inquire into the extent and distribution of their endowments. Now that the nation has established its claim to remodel the Universities solely with a view to the public interest, and is taking stock, as it were, of the property which has fallen under its disposal, the very occasion has come when scientific men should formulate their demands on behalf of those public interests which the practical politician is likely to neglect. It must, moreover, be borne in mind that the impulse in this direction must come from without, for although it will not be difficult to prove that no less benefit would accrue to the Universities themselves than to the cause of Science from the scheme herein advocated, yet the most advanced academical reformers do not seem to have got beyond the notion of extending and perfecting the professorial functions.

We propose then to show at some length that the Endowment of Research should naturally take a leading place in the reconstruction of the University system which appears to be close at hand, and to indicate in what manner such endowment may most readily be carried into effect. For this purpose it will not be necessary to reveal the many minor abuses which the reforms of twenty years ago failed to remove, but it will be necessary to adopt the more difficult task of sketching out the true conception of what a University should be, and of considering the comparative claims to endowment of teaching and of study.

Without any attempt to prejudge the matter, or to awake the dormant controversy as to the original meaning of the word, it may be safely laid down that a University No. 195-VOL. VIII.

is an institution composed of the most competent teachers and the most promising students, on which the State, in consideration of its diligently promoting the higher education, confers a lofty position and important privileges. That such an institution should enjoy large endowments is evidently not of the essence of its nature, for the Universities of old were uniformly most famous when they were least rich it is, however, absolutely necessary for the healthy activity of its functions that it should not be so encumbered with wealth as to be disposed to lavish sinecures upon its favourite members. It is evident, also, that it will forfeit its trust as the home of Culture and of Science, and will degenerate into a lyceum for the adult sons of the well-to-do classes, unless it continually maintains itself on a level with the ever-advancing boundaries of human knowledge, and that just so far as it lags behind it will exercise a mischievous influence on the simple public, who continue to rely upon its treacherous authority. Further, it is of great importance that the original institution, on which alone the rank was bestowed, and which alone deserves the high privileges, should not be absorbed by the growth of a number of parasitic institutions, whose interests and aims may be not identical with or even analogous to its own. But above all other symptoms of decay that a University can show, is to be placed its rejection of the highest branches of knowledge which the progressive activity of human thought is ever compre. hending within the domain of Science. To this danger the most ancient and the most wealthy Universities are naturally the most exposed. Their antiquity leads them to regard the erudition which they have inherited through many centuries as synonymous with real knowledge, and their wealth is used (where it is not misused) to afford encouragement only to those kinds of learning which their traditions have sanctified. In brief, a false University would be an institution which is content merely to satisfy the demand for teaching which custom approves, and which neglects as a hindrance to its tuitional duties the higher knowledge which it was originally founded to promote.

To recall such a University to the true conception of its duties no mere mechanical changes with reference to its internal organisation will be sufficient. It has lost the spirit of disinterested study which first gave it life, and the atmosphere of intellectual activity under which alone it can flourish. It requires that new vigour should be poured into it, and a new order of workers established within its limits. It requires to be relieved of the burden of part of its wealth, in order that it may receive back again greater advantages than it can give. By endowing research in all those departments of knowledge to which the scientific method has been already extended, and by reserving the power of similar endowment for those other departments of knowledge which will, no doubt, before long be similarly reduced to order and law, Oxford and Cambridge may yet regain the proud position which was once theirs, as "bodies of learned men devoting their lives to the cultivation of Science, and the direction of academical teaching."

To point out more particularly the source from which the endowments of research should be drawn, it will be necessary to revive the original distinction between the Universities and the Colleges of which they may be said to be now composed. To raise the University proper at

the expense of the individual Colleges, has long been a favourite project with academical reformers, yet no one yet appears to propose any more radical scheme than an augmentation in the number of University Professors, and a diminution in the influence of College tutors. Against any such scheme, however carefully elaborated, there arise the old objections that an improvement in the mechanism of teaching is not the main reform of which the Universities stand in need, and that the endowment of more teachers will not remedy the crying evil which has so lamentably hindered the advance of purely scientific investigation in this country. The circumstance that the Universities are comparatively poor, while many of the Colleges are very rich, and an awakening conviction that the Colleges exist for the Universities, and not the Universities for the Colleges, would seem to have suggested the above proposal whereas the smallest historical knowledge of the objects with which the Colleges were originally founded, would reveal the curious circumstance that the first benefactors had a truer conception of the manner in which knowledge ought to be endowed, than have the modern recipients of their benefits. Nothing can be more certain, though nothing is more frequently denied by those whose duty it is to be better informed, than that the majority of the great Colleges were not founded to be boarding schools for teachers and students, subordinate to the University curriculum, but to be homes at the central seats of learning, where life-long students might be supported while acquiring all the knowledge of the age, and augmenting the store of learning which they had there inherited. According to the old Oxford tradition, she could boast in the fifteenth century before there was ever a wealthy College that she had thousands of students living in hundreds of private halls. Many of the early Colleges did not include at all in their arrangements those whom we should now call Undergraduates, some of those which did do so allowed for a teaching staff independent of the body of Fellows, and it is within modern memory that many Colleges have had more Fellows than Undergraduates on their books. All these facts, and there are many similar ones, go to prove decisively that, in the language of Mr. Mark Pattison, "the Colleges were in their origin endowments not for the elements of a general liberal education, but for the prolonged study of special and professional faculties by men of riper age: and that so far from it being the intention of a Fellowship to support its holder as a teacher, it was rather its purpose to relieve him from the drudgery of teaching for a maintenance, and to set him free to give his whole time to the studies and exercises of his faculty." The wish of the Founders, that is to say, when harmonised with the wants of the present age, and interpreted into the language of modern science, was to afford the means of living and the instruments of work to those who pledge their lives to the unremunerative task of scientific investigation, and original research.

Surely then, if the influential and wealthy members of our Universities have at heart the real interest of their Institutions, or retain any veneration for the express intentions of their benefactors, they should not be the last to join in the patriotic object of raising the scientific reputation of this country, and increasing in manifold unseen ways the elements of our national greatness.

C.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

Life of Alexander von Humboldt, compiled by F. Löwenberg, Robert Ave-Lallemant, and Alfred Dove. Edited by Professor Karl Bruhns. Translated by J. and C. Lassell. 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1873.)

E cordially welcome this admirable translation of the only biography of A. v. Humboldt that has yet appeared possessing any authentic or scientific value. Humboldt's own definitely expressed aversion to biographical notices, whether in regard to himself or his friends, the fact of his having outlived nearly all his blood-relations and the greater number of the contemporaries of his earlier working years, together with other causes, combined, for a time, to retard the appearance of a trustworthy life of this remarkable man.

The want of such a work was, however, strongly felt, and at the Congress of Astronomers convened at Vienna on Sept. 14, 1869, in honour of the centenary of A. v. Humboldt's birth, Dr. Karl Bruhns, Director of the Observatory at Leipzig, laid before the meeting the prospectus of a Scientific Biography of their great countryman, for which he demanded their active co-operation. The result of this appeal and of his own editorial labours, was the appearance last year, in Germany, of the work of which the present excellent translation gives us two volumes. The third volume of the original, which consists of critical résumés by various writers of the state of different branches of the physical and natural sciences, with notices of Humboldt's contributions to each, has been omitted by the translators, on the ground that the facts were treated of with sufficient minuteness in the general biography. On less good grounds, as it appears to us, they have also omitted from the last section of the second volume, the comprehensive catalogue of his published writings, of which upwards of 600 are enumerated in this list.

Humboldt's life, like the work devoted to its exposition, resolves itself into two distinct parts or periods. The first of these is characterised by intense and incessant activity in the acquisition of knowledge, the second by the quiet mature elaboration of the results of earlier study and observation ending in a thirty years' term of comparative stagnation under the depressing influences of honorary court servitude.

Alexander v. Humboldt was born at Berlin, in 1769, and together with his elder brother Wilhelm, was prepared under excellent private tutors for his university career at Frankfort, A. O., where he matriculated in 1787. He had already then shown that craving for the accumulation of facts which he retained to his latest years, and from his boyhood had been distinguished for his love of observing and collecting natural history objects, and his inaptitude for acquiring the exact classical scholarship for which his brother evinced such marked ability. Botany was Alexander's first love, and the earliest of his voluminous literary productions was a treatise in French which appeared anonymously at Berlin, in 1789, in the Gazette Literaire, entitled, "Sur le Bohon-Upas, par un jeune Gentilhomme de Berlin." This composition was, however, rapidly followed by papers on the flora and geology of the Rhine lands, and other districts which he visited in the course of the few short intervals of cessation

from study which mark his university career, and by numerous essays on mathematical, physical, medical, physiological, and even classical subjects; for by dint of hard work he had, during his attendance on Heyne's Greek lectures at Göttingen, so thoroughly mastered his earlier deficiencies that he won from that learned professor the distinction of being commended as "a better philologer than any who had left the class for many years." The University of Göttingen to which the brothers had migrated in 1789, and which had already begun to attract students from all parts, as the best school of pure and practical science, afforded the advantages that Frankfort had failed to give them; and here, under Lichtenberg, Gmelin, Osiander and Blumenbach, Alexander laid the solid foundations of those varied acquisitions in the departments of physical and natural science, which justly entitle him to rank as the greatest pioneer in the cause of modern research. Others may have very far surpassed him in one or more domains of inquiry, but no one man in his time has done more than A. v. Humboldt in accumulating materials, testing evidence, repeating experiments and carrying on observations in almost every section of knowledge by which the labours of subsequent inquirers have been lightened. To his latest years, Humboldt did justice to the benefit which he had derived from Göttingen, which he had entered with "the unusual advantages," as we are told by his former tutor, the mathematician, Fischer," of having received an excellent education, and of possessing a proficiency in mathematics which might have secured him distinction had he been able to devote his attention exclusively, or even partially, to that science." Political economy had, however, already become the principal object of his studies, in consequence of his having made choice of the public bureaucratic service of the State as his future career. In 1790 his experiences of foreign travel were begun during a visit to England, made in company with George Forster, the friend whose adventurous voyages and various books of travel had given Humboldt from his earliest boyhood the keenest desire to visit tropical lands, and see with his own eyes the exotic floras and faunas which he described in such glowing colours. The journal which records the experiences of this tour gives evidence of the astonishing range of information possessed at this time by Humboldt, who, true to his destined vocation, set himself steadily to work to observe everything bearing upon the politico-economical aspects of English life, although his scientific tastes are perpetually cropping out in remarks upon the geological features of the country. To this first experience of English life and to the influence exerted on his future pursuits by intercourse with George Forster and his friends, Humboldt long looked back with grateful pleasure. Soon after his return to Germany he went to Hamburg for the sake of attending lectures on currency, book-keeping, and other practical branches of commercial knowledge at the Academy of Commerce, which, under the management of its chief professors, the jurists Busch and Ebeling, was attracting the attendance of young men preparing for a political career.

From Hamburg A. von Humboldt passed to the Freiberg School of Mines, where, under Werner, he prepared himself for the special duties of the post of Assessor and Superintendent of Mines to which he had for some time

aspired, and which for a time after its attainment seemed to him the realisation of all his wishes. No employé had ever been more zealous, and all his reports were expansive geognostic treatises on the districts he was called upon to survey. The charm of novelty soon, however, wore off, and then the complete stagnation, the systematised redtapeism, and the absolute dearth of intellectual or rational interests belonging to Prussian Public Service in those times, proved as unbearable to Alexander as they had already become to his elder brother, and both ceased their official connection with the State at the first moment they could do so. Society in Berlin was equally distasteul to them on account of the prejudice and etiquette by which it was regulated, and after a prolonged and happy sojourn at Jena and Weimar, the then active centres of the true intellectual, æsthetical, and literary life of Germany, Alexander proceeded, on the death of his mother in 1796, to carry out his long-cherished dream of visiting far distant tropical regions. To prepare himself thoroughly for this purpose had been for years the object of his studies, and few men were ever better fitted than himself for the end he had in view. To his other qualifications for becoming an efficient scientific traveller, he added the possession of an almost unparalleled range of knowledge, including an intimate acquaintance with the character, history, and resources of his own country, unbounded love of nature, unflinching perseverance, nearly inexhaustible capacity for work, wide sympathies with his fellow-men, a ready gift of pleasing and being pleased, and an ardent, almost ideal enthusiasm, which found expression in his own favourite motto, "Der Mensch muss das Grosse und Gute wollen" (Man must strive after the Great and the Good).

After oft repeated disappointments and many shattered plans, A. v. Humboldt, in spite of the numerous obstacles arising from the disturbed political condition of Europe at the time, achieved his longcherished project of visiting the New World, and in the summer of 1799 he landed in South America. In the following year he and his companion and friend, Bonpland, plunged into the steaming forests of the Orinoco, and bidding farewell to civilisation, threw themselves into the work before them. An enormous mass of specimens collected from every kingdom of nature preceded A. v. H.'s return to Europe in 1804, and gave the scientific world at home a faint foreshadowing of the gigantic dimensions of the labours accomplished by that indefatigable explorer. Paris was at that time the only spot where a work such as he meditated could be produced, and accordingly thither he repaired, and after securing the co-operation of Cuvier, Latreille, and many of the other leaders of science, proceeded to elaborate his materials. The result of these combined labours was the appearance, in 1807, of the magnificent work known as "Voyage aux Régions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent fait dans les années 1799 à 1804, par A. de Humboldt et A. Boupland." The cost of bringing out this colossal résumé of his American observations involved Humboldt in pecuniary embarrassments, from which he can scarcely be said ever to have freed himself, and which had moreover the disastrous results of forcing him to accept help at a subsequent period from the King of Prussia; and thus incur an obligation which he found