"Humboldt was always considered a good-tempered, kindly-natured man, but
his talk was a little fault-finding.
"He said: 'Lieutenant Maury has been useful, but for the director of an
observatory he has put forth some strange statements in the 'Geography
of the Sea.'
"He asked me if Mrs. Somerville was now occupied with pure mathematics.
He said: 'There she is strong. I never saw her but once. She must be
over sixty years old.' In reality she was seventy-seven. He spoke with
admiration of Mrs. Somerville's 'Physical Geography,'--said it was
excellent because so concise. 'A German woman would have used more
words.'
"Humboldt asked me if they could apply photography to the small
stars--to the eighth or ninth magnitude. I had asked the same question
of Professor Bond, of Cambridge, and he had replied, 'Give me $500,000,
and we can do it; but it is very expensive.'
"Humboldt spoke of the fifty-three small planets, and gave his opinion
that they could not be grouped together; that there was no apparent
connection.
"Having lost all his teeth, Humboldt's articulation was indistinct--he
talked very rapidly. His hair was thin and very white, his eyes very
blue, his nose too broad and too flat; yet he was a handsome man. He
wore a white necktie, a black dress-coat, buttoned up, but not so much
so that it hid a figured dark-blue and white waistcoat. He was a little
deaf. He told me that he was eighty-nine years old, and that he and
Bonpland, alone, were living of those who in early life were on
expeditions together; that Bonpland was eighty-five, and much the more
vigorous of the two.
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