Sublime

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

The idea for a railroad to supplant all of that originated in New York in the late 1840s, shortly before the news of California gold reached the East. The founders were three unlikely, dissimilar individuals, none of whom knew anything about building a railroad, even under favorable conditions. Henry Chauncey was a Wall Street financier. William He

The first of five volumes appeared in 1845, when Humboldt…

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The young Latin American intellectual Simón Bolívar had sought him out in Rome one year to talk about political freedom. John Charles Frémont, who regarded Humboldt as a god, had gone off exploring and sprinkled Humboldt’s name all over the map of Nevada. John Bachman would say that his own interest in natural history began with meeting Humboldt at

He would be regarded as the incomparable high priest of nineteenth-century science—a towering godlike inspiration to such a disparate assortment of individuals as John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Charles Lyell, Simón Bolívar, W. H. Hudson, William Hickling Prescott, Edward Whymper, Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz. Da

For three months they explored and mapped the coastal plain, collecting some sixteen hundred plants—palms, orchids, grasses, bamboos—among which they were able to identify six hundred new species. They witnessed a total eclipse, an earthquake, and, on a night in November, a spectacular meteor shower that went on for hours. They paddled up the Apure