The years went by slowly. On her ninety-sixth birthday the King of Prussia sent her a gold medal, Alexander von Humboldt writing her a letter from Berlin to accompany it.
January 14, 1848, at the age of almost ninety-eight, Caroline Herschel died, and was buried from the same garrison church where nearly a century before she had been christened. In her coffin was placed, by her desire, a lock of her brother's hair. Beautiful affection! great co-workers in their immortal study of unnumbered worlds!
The great Agassiz, in his eloquent address, in Boston, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Humboldt, said: "All the fundamental facts of popular education in physical science, beyond the merest elementary instruction, we owe to him. We are reaping daily in every school throughout the broad land, where education is the heritage of the poorest child, the intellectual harvest sown by him.
"There is not a text-book of geography, or a school atlas in the hands of our children to-day, which does not bear, however blurred and defaced, the impress of his great mind. But for him our geographies would be mere enumerations of localities and statistics. He first suggested the graphic methods of representing natural phenomena which are now universally adopted. The first geological sections, the first sections across an entire continent, the first averages of climate illustrated by lines, were his. Every school-boy is familiar with his methods now, but he does not know that Humboldt is his teacher...."
Naturally we ask how such a man rose to fame, and what incited him to stand among the few intellectual leaders of the world.
Frederick William Henry _Alexander_ von Humboldt was born September 14, 1769, in Berlin, the same year as Baron Cuvier. Unlike Cuvier, he came into a home of wealth and culture. His father was a Prussian officer and chamberlain to the king. His mother, the widow of Baron von Hollwede, married Major von Humboldt when he was forty-six years old, bringing into the family much landed property. Three children were born to them, a daughter who died in infancy, and the famous brothers, William and Alexander, the former two years older than the latter.
The father, an exceedingly amiable and benevolent man, died when Alexander was but ten years old. The mother, left with her two sons, was wise enough to select superior tutors for them, deeming a good education their best preparation for a useful life.