Hundred Days of Reform or the Peru Current Carlos Montufar, a scientist who later became a revolutionary in Ecuador, accompanied the pair on part of their trip Humboldt enjoyed many distinctions He was the first European to witness native South Americans preparing curare arrow poison from a vine and the first person to recognize the need to preserve the cinchona plant, the bark of which contains quinine used to cure malaria He was the first person to accurately draw Inca ruins in South America at Canar, Peru, and he also was the first person to discover the importance of guano, dried droppings from fish-eating birds, as an excellent fertilizer In 1804 Humboldt went to Paris and chronicled his field studies in 30 volumes He stayed in France for 23 years and regularly met with other intellectuals Eventually he depleted his fortunes because of his travels and self-publishing his reports In 1827 he returned to Berlin and secured a steady income by becoming adviser to the king of Prussia From 1827 to 1828 he gave public lectures in Berlin, and his lectures were so popular that he had to find huge halls to hold all of the people In the 1830s the czar of Russia invited Humboldt to Russia, and after he explored the country and described some of his discoveries, including permafrost, he recommended that Russia build weather observatories across the country Russia built these weather stations in 1835, and Humboldt used the data from them to develop the principle of continentality, the concept that the interiors of continents have more extreme climates because of the lack of the moderating influence from the ocean At the age of 60, Humboldt traveled to the Ural Mountains in Siberia and to Central Asia to study the weather He wrote extensively about his travels and discoveries One of his books, A Personal Narrative, inspired Darwin As Humboldt made more scientific discoveries, he decided to write everything known about the Earth He titled his work Kosmos and published the first volume in 1845, when he was 76 years old His work was well written and well received, and the first volume, a general overview of the universe, sold out in two months His other volumes explored topics including astronomy, Earth, and human interaction Humboldt died at age 90 in 1859, and the fifth and final volume of Kosmos was published in 1862, based on his notes He is buried in Tegel, Germany, and his name is commemorated in a few places in his native country, including in front of the Humboldt University in Berlin and on his grave in Tegel Many landmarks in the Americas, including a current, a river, a mountain 185 range, a reservoir, a salt marsh, parks, and many counties and towns are named for Humboldt On the Moon, Humboldt’s Sea is named in his honor Further reading: Gendron, Val The Dragon Tree: A Life of Alexander Baron von Humboldt New York: Longmans, Green, 1961; Helferich, Gerard Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World New York: Gotham, 2004; Humboldt, Alexander von, and Nicolass A Rupke Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; Rupke, Nicholass A Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography Frankfurt: Frankfurt am Main, 2005 Caryn E Neumann Hundred Days of Reform The inadequacies of the Self-Strengthening Movement adopted by the Qing (Ch’ing) government of China convinced many educated Chinese that only thorough institutional reforms could save the nation from the expansionist ambitions of the Western powers and Japan In 1895 defeat by Japan and the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki provided the catalyst that stirred into action a group of candidates who had gathered in the capital, Beijing, for the triennial metropolitan examinations One of the candidates, named Kang Youwei (K’ang Yu-wei), penned a long memorial to the throne protesting against the treaty and urging immediate reforms; it was cosigned by 603 of the candidates and gained widespread attention Eliciting no response, Kang and his student Liang Qichao (Liang Ch’i-ch’iao) began to organize study societies in Beijing and other major cities, sponsoring lectures and founding newspapers and magazines with the goal of promoting modernization and political change By 1898 their study societies had galvanized a sizable number of reform-minded intellectuals into a political force Meanwhile, the young emperor Guangxu (Kuanghsu), who had nominally assumed the reins of government, began to show sympathy for the new reform ideas and read many of Kang’s memorials and other works He was particularly impressed by Kang’s accounts of reforms under Peter the Great of Russia and in Meiji Japan As a result, he appointed him and his supporters to important government positions Between June 11 and September 16, 1898, over 40 reform decrees were