name for himself as a boldly innovating mining engineer and spare-time botanist. He then seemed to leap from science to science (it was still possible) making generous contributions to physiology, electro-magnetism, astronomy, meteorology, anthropology, oceanography and geophysics. He was largely the founder of modern geography, coining many terms still in use, getting the question of how mountains originated out of the philosophers' chambers and correlating for the first time altitudes, latitudes and types of rocks and soils with varieties of flora and fauna. An indefatigable collector and cataloguer, map maker and mountain climber, sketch artist, lecturer, letter writer and conversationalist, his friends included Goethe, the Mendelssohns, Mme. de Stael and Schiller, Jefferson, Madison, Peale, Gallatin and Fremont, Bolivar, Metternich, Chateaubriand, Guizot and the Empress Josephine, Volta, Laplace, Lyell, Cuvier and Gauss and many others, famed or forgotten. He invented safety devices still used by miners, tested electrical effects on his own skin, campaigned for labor reforms and attacked slavery with a scathing economic analysis, traded insults with Napoleon and with Hegel, collected and classified millions of plant specimens, observed and recorded tides, stars, soils, temperatures and the customs of American primitives, made major corrections in the maps of the Americas and took time out to serve, like his also famous brother, as a diplomat.

So varied was his experience that such a brief review as this may sound like a mere catalogue. However, de Terra's fine biography traces with breathless. warmth the frail youth's development and early fame, the ambitious exploratory trip through the Americas that established his basic reputation (and fixed his name on counties and towns, mountains and ocean currents) and his return to the salons of a Europe torn by the Napoleonic wars. The same wars cut off the Baron's economic independence, severely hampering the publication of his studies and ultimately reducing the outspoken democrat to the hated role of a courtier and intellectual front-man for Frederick William, King of Prussia.

In a sense, Humboldt's life was tragic. A Faustian character seemingly capable of being all things, doing all things, knowing all things, a man of tremendous energies and even greater ambitions-as he aged, his accomplishments seemed dwarfed by incompleted undertakings, and his declining years became a desperate race to finish the better portion of the great work he had undertaken (literally a compendium of scientific knowledge) and a long niggling struggle with printers, publishers and co-editors to bring the thousands of pages of manuscripts to final form.

He barely missed the historical fame of better remembered contemporaries by not propounding a single revolutionary new theory (though such as Agassiz, Morse and Darwin were inspired and assisted by the old man) but he laid much of the groundwork of modern science. Latin Americans still consider him the giant of 19th Century science. His encylopediac writings, long immensely popular, have now become chiefly passe, but he was regarded as a hero in his old age, both for his research and popularization of science, and for his championship of democracy.

The biographer discusses plainly Humboldt's homosexuality and his friendships, and, though some critics protest that this is gratuitous assumption of de Terra's part, this reviewer feels the evidence is conclusive and quite relevant to Humboldt's work and historical importance. Humboldt, like Aristotle, Bacon and! Da Vinci, drew from his sexual nature much of the impetus that made him "a universal man."

Lyn Pedersen

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