peace, treacherously fell upon the camp of the unsuspecting emperor, and, spite of a gallant resistance, destroyed eight thousand of the imperial troops. The sovereign only escaped captivity by plunging with his horse into the Ganges; and there he would have perished, had it not been for an inflated leathern bag lent to him by a water-carrier, on which, when his horse was drowned, he reached the opposite bank. Defeat and disaster continued to pursue the unfortunate monarch. His brothers traitorously turned against him. The provincial governors withheld their contingents, and even sought to seize him and give him up to Shir Khan. Slowly and painfully he found himself compelled to abandon his dominions and flee to Persia. The fearful sufferings undergone by himself and followers, in their flight across the sandy deserts of Western India, are narrated by Ferishta. With the aid of an army, furnished by Tamasp Shah of Persia, Humâyûn recovered part of his dominions and captured his rebellious brothers. Unwilling to put them to death, he punished Kamran, the foremost among them, with the loss of his eyes. The Affghan conquerors of Agra and Delhi were next assailed, and forced to abandon all the conquests they had made. After an absence of fourteen years, Humâyûn re-entered his capital in triumph. He enjoyed his restoration for but a brief period, being killed in his forty-eighth year by an accidental fall down the marble stairs of a garden terrace in 1556. The memoirs of Humâyûn were written in Persian by Jouher, one of his confidential servants, an English translation of which, by Major C. Stewart, was published in London, 1832.—R. H.
HUMBERT, a native of Burgundy. Leo IX. took him to Rome and made him archbishop of Sicily, and a cardinal. He went to Constantinople to refute the opinions of Nicetas, of which he wrote an account. He also drew up the Recantation of Berengarius and other works. He died about 1063.—B. H. C.
HUMBERT, Joseph Amable, a French general, was one of those men who, without genius or merit, were thrown up to the surface of society from its lowest stratum by the violent convulsions of the French revolution. He was born at Rouveroye, near Remiremont, in 1767, and if ever he knew his parents at all, he lost them when he was very young. Receiving no regular education, he abandoned himself early in life to the indulgence of his passions. At seventeen he obtained a humble situation in a house of business at Nancy, from which he was soon discharged for bad conduct. A similar fate pursued him after he became a workman in a hat manufactory at Lyons. He then tried his fortune as a dealer in rabbit-skins and goat-skins, and probably found a wandering gipsy life of that kind more congenial to his disposition than any settled employment. On the breaking out of the Revolution he enlisted in a battalion of volunteers of the department of the Vosges. His courage, his handsome figure, and martial aspect contributed to his rapid promotion. He held a command under Beurnonville in the force which invaded Treves at the beginning of 1793. His chief, however, having discovered that Humbert in his democratic zeal had requested permission of the convention to denounce traitors in the army to them, summarily dismissed him. Returning to Paris his position in the Jacobin Club favoured his appointment to a command in the Vendean war, in which he acquired the questionable honour of arresting Cormatin, chief of the insurgents, after terms of pacification had been signed on both sides. He is charged with a still more outrageous violation of treaty with the emigrants who landed at Quiberon, two thousand of whom he shot after the fall of Fort Penthiévre, in defiance of the capitulation he had concluded with them. The directory, nevertheless, sent him under Hoche to make a descent upon Ireland. Humbert and his men were the only part of the expedition that reached that country. They landed in Killala Bay in August, 1798, at the time the English government was harassed by the revolutionary attempts of Wolf Tone, Napper Tandy, and others. The first rumours of their strength were greatly exaggerated, and the lord-lieutenant, Cornwallis, doubtful of the fidelity of the militia regiments at his disposal, determined to assemble an efficient force before he attacked the invaders. So great was the panic or the treachery of the militia, that General Lake had the mortification at Castlebar to see two of his regiments run away, and himself obliged to retreat before about a thousand Frenchmen. By the 8th of September, however, Humbert and the remnant of his army, eight hundred and fifty men in all, surrendered to General Lake at Ballynamuck. On being exchanged, Humbert joined the army of the Danube and fought under Massena. In 1802 he was sent with Leclerc to St. Domingo, whence he returned the following year in company with the widowed Madame Leclerc, Napoleon's sister Pauline. The scandals to which this voyage gave rise, furnished the First Consul with an excuse for sending into honourable exile the too republican general. From Britanny, whither he was sent, Humbert retired to America, where he lived in obscurity until the revolt of the Spanish colonies, when he once more engaged in war. In Mexico, where he had sometimes a large number of men under his command, he met with a few successes and many reverses. He died at New Orleans in February, 1823.—R. H.
HUMBOLDT, Friedrich Heinrich Alexander, Baron von, a celebrated naturalist and traveller, descended from an ancient, wealthy, and noble family in Pomerania, was born at Berlin on the 14th September, 1769. His father. Major Humboldt, served in the Seven Years' war as aid-de-camp to the duke of Brunswick, and was afterwards chamberlain to the king of Prussia. His mother was a cousin of the princess of Blucher, and the widow of the Baron De Holwede, descended from a French family in Burgundy of the name of Colomb, who had quitted France on the revocation of the edict of Nantes. Alexander Humboldt was educated at the castle of Tegel, near Berlin, under his father's roof, and by M. Camp, author of Robinson Allemand, and Christian Kunth, a distinguished savant, who afterwards became a member of the Academy of Sciences and councillor of state. Kunth was intimate with the intellectual community of Berlin; and such was the singular capacity of his pupil that he was encouraged and even assisted in his studies by the friends of his teacher. When he was only fourteen years of age, he went with his brother William to Berlin to complete his studies under Læfler and Fischer for classics, Wildenow for botany, and Endel, Klein, and Dohm for political economy and philosophy. Between 1786 and 1788 he studied at the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and in 1788 he repaired to Göttingen, where he studied philosophy, history, and the natural sciences, under Heyne, Eichhorn, and Blumenbach. His first work, written in 1789, was an essay on the method of weaving used by the Greeks, but it was not published. At Göttingen he became acquainted with George Forster, Heyne's son-in-law, who accompanied Captain Cook in his second voyage round the world, and who inspired his young friend with a desire to study the productions of the tropics. In 1790 he accompanied Forster and Genz in a tour through Germany, Holland, England, and along the two banks of the Rhine; and he published the result of his tour in a work entitled "Observations sur les Basaltes du Rhin," &c., which appeared at Berlin in 1790. At the close of 1790 he went to Hamburg, where he studied foreign languages and bookkeeping in the commercial school of Bosching; and though his family intended him for some office under the government, his mother yielded so far to his passion for science as to send him to the mining academy at Freiberg, to extend and perfect his geological knowledge under Werner, who had then for one of his pupils the celebrated Baron Von Bach. The reputation which Humboldt had now acquired was such as to obtain for him the government appointment of assessor of the council of mines at Berlin, and soon afterwards that of director general of the mines in the principalities of Anspach and Bayreuth. With the knowledge acquired in the discharge of these duties he wrote and published in 1693 his "Specimen Floræ Freibergensis," a work in which he described the cryptogamic and subterranean plants of the district. The occupation of superintendent of mines and smelting works, though congenial with his geological tastes, did not afford scope enough to his genius and enterprise. His passion for scientific research could not brook the interruptions of professional toil, and he longed to throw off the harness of official labour which now encumbered him. Schemes of foreign travel occupied all his thoughts, and he resolved to prepare himself for their accomplishment. M. Galvani of Bologna had about this time founded a new science on the convulsive twitches of the nerve in the leg of a frog when touched with a knife. Humboldt rushed into this new field of inquiry with a zeal bordering on extravagance. He made wounds in his back by means of cantharides, in order that the metals of the galvanic circle might be better applied to the muscle. The results of these researches were published in 1796, and the French translation of the work, which appeared in 1799, entitled "Experiences sur l'irritation Nerveuse et Musculaire," was enriched with notes by the illustrious Blumenbach. Upon the death of his mother on the 20th November, 1796, Humboldt had resolved to undertake some
