Brave Companions

Humboldt lived long enough to see most of his ideas become old hat, and he concluded toward the end that his chief contribution had been to influence younger men.

He wished to convey the excitement of science to the intelligent nonscientific reader. He had been thinking about such a work for fifty years. He could not accept what he called the narrow-minded, sentimental view that nature loses its…

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The most ambitious publishing effort of his career was launched, a work of ten volumes encompassing the entire natural history of the United States. It was his “endeavor to make myself understood by all.”

Part of the construction problem can be appreciated in a single statistic. In those forty-seven and a half miles it was necessary to build 170 bridges of more than twelve feet each in length.

Like Humboldt before him, he took the greatest pride in the influence he had on the next generation of naturalists. And indeed the subsequent careers of his students and museum assistants are as strong a testament to his genius as almost anything else.

Several times in his book, to substantiate one point or another, Darwin had referred to observations by Agassiz (on embryological succession, for example). But Darwin’s conclusions were “the sum of wrong-headedness,” Agassiz told his students. Darwin’s theory, Agassiz instructed the members of the Boston Society of Natural History, was “ingenious b

The evil of technology was not in technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical ingenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, our sense of personal accountability.

In an odd, paradoxical way he became obsessed with an apocalyptic world of ice, the entire globe frozen in death—he who had given himself so wholeheartedly to the study of life, he who was such an exuberant life force. It remained only to find the familiar traces in the Southern Hemisphere as well. So while Darwin, gray, stooped, two years younger

It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent

The first of five volumes appeared in 1845, when Humboldt…

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