To the northward, in Humboldt and the adjacent counties, whole hillsides are covered with rhododendron, making a glorious melody of bee-bloom in the spring.

Baron von Humboldt.

To-day I went to Potsdam to see Baron Humboldt, and had a delightful interview with this wonderful man.

" On the margin of a photograph of himself, presented to Morse by the baron, is an inscription in French of which the following is a translation: To Mr. S.F.B. Morse, whose philosophic and useful labors have rendered his name illustrious in two worlds, the homage of the high and affectionate esteem of Alexander Humboldt.

The islands are supposed to have been known to the Phoenicians, and Humboldt holds out a flattering possibility of Phoenician traces yet discoverable.

This lent additional interest to a mysterious inscription which we hunted up in a church built in the time of Philip II., at the north end of the island; we had the satisfaction of sending a copy of it to Humboldt, though it turned out to be only a Latin inscription clothed in uncouth Greek characters, such as have long passed for Runic in the Belgian churches and elsewhere.

In post octavo, BARON WILLIAM VON HUMBOLDT'S LETTERS TO A LADY.

This, however, appears, from more recent researches, on the accuracy of which Humboldt relies with reason, to have been larger than the reality justified; and the whole of Tenochtitlan may be said to have been contained in the present states of Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, Puebla, Mexico, and Valadolid.

The whole republic, according to Humboldt, occupies a space of 75,830 square leagues, of twenty to an equinoxial degree; on which there are to be found every inequality of surface, and every variety of soil and climate, the two last of which are dependent in most cases on the former.

The Indian population is chiefly centered in the great plains, and towards the south; and Humboldt thinks that it has flowed from the north to the south.

Humboldt considers the Mexican Indian as destitute of all imagination, though when to a certain degree educated, he attributes to him facility in learning, a clearness of understanding, a natural turn for reasoning, and a particular aptitude to subtilize and seize trifling distinctions.

Humboldt states that the police were in the practice of sending tumbrels round, to collect the unhappy victims of intoxication.

Baron Humboldt and Mr. Bullock have reduced the floating gardens of Mexico to mud banks, with ditches between; and lieutenant Beachey makes it appear, that the gardens of the Hesperides are nothing more than old stone quarries, the bottoms of which have been cultivated.

Baron Humboldt, who visited Cuba in 1801 and again in 1825, and wrote learnedly about it, states that "the first settlement of the whites occurred in 1511, when Velasquez, under orders from Don Diego Columbus, landed at Puerto de las Palmas, near Cape Maisi, and subjugated the Cacique Hatuey who had fled from Haiti to the eastern end of Cuba, where he became the chief of a confederation of several smaller native princes."

Humboldt makes the following comment: "No means now exist to arrive at a knowledge of the population of Cuba in the time of Columbus; but how can we admit what some otherwise judicious historians state, that when the island of Cuba was conquered in 1511, it contained a million inhabitants of whom only 14,000 remained in 1517.

Baron Humboldt states that from that time until 1790, the total number of African negroes imported as slaves was 90,875.

In the next thirty years, the business increased rapidly, and Humboldt estimates the total arrivals, openly entered and smuggled in, from 1521 to 1820, as 372,449.

Mr. J.S. Thrasher, in a translation of Humboldt's work, issued in 1856, added a footnote showing the arrivals up to 1854 as 644,000.

Humboldt, who studied the institution while it was most extensive, states that "the position of the free negroes in Cuba is much better than it is elsewhere, even among those nations which have for ages flattered themselves as being most advanced in civilization.

Writing about the year 1825, Humboldt says: "It is more than probable that the imports of the whole island, licit and contraband, estimated at the actual value of the goods and the slaves, amount, at the present time, to fifteen or sixteen millions of dollars, of which barely three or four millions are re-exported."

Nearly a hundred years ago, Alexander Humboldt, a traveller and a scientist, wrote thus of the island of Cuba: "Notwithstanding the absence of deep rivers and the unequal fertility of the soil, the island of Cuba presents on every hand a most varied and agreeable country from its undulating character, its ever-springing verdure, and the variety of its vegetable formations.

Robertson, Dupaix, Stephens, Humboldt, are all objects of Mr. Wilson's vituperation or contempt.

To say that Alexander von Humboldt is probably the most learned man in Europe, and that Robert A. Wilson is undoubtedly one of the most ignorant men in America, would give but a slight notion of the contrast between them.

Humboldt is not merely a man of science and a philosopher,titles which the adopted Iroquois regards with natural scorn,he has been also a great traveller, and knows almost every part of Spanish America from personal examination.

From the days of Humboldt and Spix and Martius to the present time, German explorers have borne a conspicuous part in the exploration of South America.