Darwin would confide that Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics, read over and over again during his youth, had inspired his entire career. Darwin also liked Humboldt’s account of an earthquake at Caracas enough to have lifted some of it, pretty much intact, for his Voyage of the Beagle.

Walter is assured a place in history because he is the Lord Rothschild to whom Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, addressed the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, saying His Majesty’s Government viewed with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. It was written in the form of a letter beginning “Dear

What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of

Fifty years ago the center of world power and interest was Europe. On the maps of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East there were no countries called Tanzania or Zaire. Or the People’s Republic of China. Or Vietnam. Or Israel. Furthermore, fifty years ago the physical limits of the human adventure were still defined by the geography of the earth

From the legal-diplomatic standpoint the undertaking was made possible by a treaty signed in Bogotá. Panama was still part of Colombia (or New Granada, as it was then known), and for years the government at Bogotá had been urging Great Britain and France to guarantee New Granada’s sovereignty over the isthmus as well as the neutrality of any future

Henry David Thoreau gathered up turtles and a black snake for him from the shores of Walden Pond.

At best, a crossing from ocean to ocean took four to six days, and for all who survived, it remained one of life’s memorable experiences.

Humboldt died on May 6, 1859. He was in his ninetieth year and still at work, on the final volume of Cosmos. He had never returned to Spanish America, unlike Bonpland, who, after serving for a time as the head of the Empress Josephine’s gardens, left Paris for South America, where he finished out his days. But for all the years that had passed, for

Alexander von Humboldt—Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt—or Baron von Humboldt, as he was commonly addressed. He had been born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, the second son of a middle-aged army officer, a minor figure in the court of Frederick the Great, and of a rather solemn, domineering young woman of Huguenot descent who