One veteran of science, Alexander von Humboldt, has yielded to the great law of humanity, as inexorable as any that he found in nature. His researches in South America, though mainly confined to the valley of the Oronoco, were most thorough, and his array of facts and observations are of inestimable value. Yet, Humboldt searched into nature with the coldness of the anatomist, content with examining its material structure, rather than with the zeal of one who seeks images of Divine power impressed alike on solid rocks and gliding streams. Science, however rigid, would not have restrained the ardor of homage to the Author of creative energy and grandeur, bursting forth irrepressibly in scenes where angels would have adored the Great First Cause, and where man can do no less. Humboldt's fame as an observer is founded on a rock which no mortal power can shake. He lacked the reverential insight into the higher and deeper powers of nature, but, so far as his mental eyes saw, he described surely and vividly the manifestations of those powers. He was an observer of wonderful skill in the outer courts of nature, though he seemed either not to seek or to be bewildered in seeking her interior shrine. He exemplified rather the talent than the genius of discovery, the patient sagacity which accumulates materials, rather than the fervid enthusiasm which traces the stream of nature's action to its spring, the great Creative Will. Yet, the very title of Humboldt's great work, the concentrated fruit of a life of toil, 'Cosmos,' meaning beauty and order, and, then, the visible world, as illustrating both, seems to show a gleam of feeling above the spirit of material research. His warmest admirer could have respecting him no worthier hope than that he, who has left the scene of earthly beauty which he so long and diligently studied, may have had the joy to discern, in the sphere of celestial order, the Cosmos of the skies, higher and deeper truths than external nature can teach.