This was a very insightful read about the extraordinary Alexander von Humboldt, who lived from 1769 to 1859.
I didn’t know about Humboldt before this and wow… he inspired so many people from history I already know of, from [[Charles Darwin]] to [[Henry David Thoreau]], et al. Wow.
Notes
As he stood at the top of the world, looking down upon the mountain ranges… When Humboldt measured the altitude at 19,413 feet, he discovered that they were barely 1,000 feet below the peak. No one had ever come this high before, and no one had ever breathed such thin air.
…a living organism where everything was connected — conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world. Described by his contemporaries as the most famous man in the world after Napoleon…
Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody. He was also a man of contradictions. He was a fierce critic of colonialism and supported the revolutions in Latin America, yet was chamberlain to two Prussian kings. He admired the United States for their concept of liberty and equality, yet never stopped criticizing their failure to abolish slavery.
Where others had to ransack their memories, one colleague later said, Humboldt — “whose eyes are natural telescopes and microscopes,” as the American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said in admiration — had every morsel of knowledge and observation to hand at an instant.
[His diaries] and letters reveal a visionary, a thinker far ahead of his time. He invented isotherms — the lines of temperature and pressure that we see on today’s weather maps — and he also discovered the magnetic equator. He came up with the idea of vegetation and climate zones that snake across the globe. Most important, though, Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world.
The Invention of Nature traces the invisible threads that connect us to this extraordinary man. Humboldt influenced many of the greatest thinkers, artists and scientists of his day. Thomas Jefferson called him “one of the greatest ornaments of the age.” Charles Darwin wrote that “nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much” [as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative]…
…[would have been a] different book without Humboldt. Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt “the discoverer of the New World.” And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like “having lived several years.”
…correlation between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was “one of those wonders of the world.” His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was “in some sort bound up with the universe itself.” In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt…
[More places are named] after Humboldt than after anyone else. Ecologists, environmentalists and nature writers rely on Humboldt’s vision, although most do so unknowingly. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is based on Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness, as is scientist James Lovelock’s famous Gaia theory of the Earth as a living organism.
…through a forest wilderness. The most exciting moment was when I finally climbed Chimborazo, the mountain that had been so elemental to Humboldt’s vision. As I walked up the barren slope, the air was so thin that every step felt like an eternity — a slow pull upward while my legs…
…a great and complicated machine of the universe, as one scientist had said. After all, if man could create intricate clocks and automata, what great things could God create? According to the French philosopher René Descartes and his followers, God had given this mechanical world its initial push, while Isaac Newton regarded the universe more…
…from the West Indies, tea from China, wine from France and timber from Russia. The whole river was “a black forest of masts.” In between the large trading ships were hundreds of barges, wherries and smaller boats, undoubtedly crowded and congested. It was also a magnificent portrait of Britain’s imperial might. In London, Humboldt was introduced to…
Only a few weeks after he had arrived in Freiberg, he had to ride to Erfurt, some hundred miles to the west, to attend his brother’s wedding to Caroline. But as so often, Humboldt combined social events or family celebrations with work. Instead of simply joining the festivities in Erfurt, he turned it into a 600-mile geological expedition through the region of Thuringia.
…[but] when work demanded his attention, all was forgotten, and it would often be weeks or even months until he wrote again. Even to the few who knew him best, Humboldt often remained elusive. Meanwhile, his career soared and his interests widened. Humboldt now also became interested in the working conditions of the miners whom he saw crawling into the bowels of the earth every morning.
“…nothing but leaf,” he said. These were exciting ideas, but Goethe had no scientific sparring partner with whom to develop his theories. All that changed when he met Humboldt. It was as if Humboldt ignited the spark that had been missing for so long. When Goethe was with Humboldt, his mind worked in all directions…
…gruesome investigations. “I cannot exist without experiments,” he said. Humboldt’s favorite experiment was one that he and Goethe discovered together by chance. One morning, Humboldt placed a frog’s leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence — to silver, gold, iron, zinc and so on — but generated only a disappointingly gentle twitch in the leg…
…[the moisture of his breath], Humboldt decided, because by exhaling onto the frog’s leg it was as if he were breathing life into it. It was the perfect metaphor for the emergence of the new life sciences. In this context, they also discussed the theories of Humboldt’s former professor, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, about the forces that shaped organisms — the so-called “formative drive” and “vital forces.”
…[without] losing sight of the whole. Comparison became Humboldt’s primary means of understanding nature — not abstract mathematics or numbers. Goethe was captivated, reporting to his friends how much he admired the young man’s intellectual virtuosity. It was telling that Humboldt’s presence in Jena coincided with one of Goethe’s most productive phases in years. Not only did he join Humboldt in the anatomy tower…
…[the empiricists had] to test their theories against observations and with experiments, while the rationalists could base a thesis on logic and reason. A few years before Humboldt first met Goethe, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had declared a philosophical revolution that he boldly claimed was as radical as that of Copernicus some 250 years previously. Kant took up a position between the rationalists and the empiricists…
…[things in nature], Kant wrote in his famous Critique of Pure Reason, only existed because our mind interpreted them. Just as Copernicus had concluded that the sun couldn’t be moving around us, so, Kant said, we had to completely change our understanding of how we made sense of nature. The dualism between the external and the internal world had preoccupied philosophers for millennia.
…The Loves of the Plants. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin was a physician, inventor and scientist who, in his poem, had turned the Linnaean sexual classification system of plants into verses crowded with lustful violets, jealous cowslips and blushing roses, populated by horned snails, fluttering leaves, silver moonlight and lovemaking on mosses.
…[the forest’s ability to store water] and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil, and their cooling effect. He also talked about the impact of trees on the climate through their release of oxygen. The effects of the human species’ intervention were already “incalculable,” Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so “brutally.” Humboldt would see again and again how…
When he saw how the local people were treated by colonists and missionaries… When Humboldt returned to Europe, he brought with him a completely new portrayal of the so-called “savages.” His only frustration came when the Indians failed to answer his many questions — questions that were often posed through a chain of interpreters, as one local language had to be translated into another and then another until someone [could translate it into Spanish].
…and reappear at the great rapids, and of the moon encircled with colored rings. Later he delighted in the dark river surface, which during the day reflected like a perfect mirror the blossom-laden plants of the riverbanks, and at night the southern star constellations.
[Humboldt] would cross, climb and investigate the Andes — the chain of mountains that runs from north to south in several spines along the length of South America, some 4,500 miles from Venezuela and Colombia in the north all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. It was the longest mountain range in the world, and Humboldt wanted to climb Chimborazo, a beautiful snow-capped volcano south of Quito in today’s Ecuador.
…formations out of a primordial ocean. Others, the Vulcanists, argued that everything had originated through catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions. The pendulum was still swinging between those two concepts. One problem that European scientists encountered was that their knowledge was almost entirely limited to the only two active volcanoes in Europe, Etna and Vesuvius in Italy.
Humboldt and his travel companions finally reached Washington on the evening of June 1st. The next morning, Humboldt met Jefferson at the White House. The president welcomed the 34-year-old scientist in his private study. Here, Jefferson kept a set of carpenter’s tools because he had a knack for mechanics and enjoyed making things — from inventing a revolving book stand to improving locks, clocks and so on.
…politics, about crops and soils and the shaping of nations. Humboldt, like Jefferson, believed that only an agrarian republic brought happiness and independence. Colonialism, by contrast, brought destruction. The Spanish had arrived in South America to obtain gold and timber, either by violence or exchange, Humboldt said, “motivated only by insatiable avarice.”
…was working on ideas about the formation of the earth and the universe, which helped to shape his own ideas. The savants in Paris were pushing the boundaries of scientific thought. Everybody was excited about Humboldt’s safe return. It had been so long, one wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, that it felt as if Alexander had risen from the dead. Others proposed that Humboldt be made president of the Berlin [Academy of Sciences]…
…plantations, mines and elegant town houses — [Humboldt] met, through Montúfar, [several South Americans]. One was 21-year-old Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who would later become the leader of the revolutions in South America. Born in 1783, Bolívar was the son of one of Caracas’s wealthiest Creole families. They could trace their lineage back to another Simón de Bolívar, who had arrived in Venezuela at the end of the 16th century.
[Surrounded] with books, journals and drawings from South America, he discovered a man who was enchanted with his country, a man who couldn’t stop talking about the riches of a continent unknown to most Europeans. As Humboldt spoke of the great rapids of the Orinoco and of the soaring peaks of the Andes, of towering palms and electric eels, Bolívar realized that no European had ever painted South America in such vivid colors before.
…[Coleridge] and Wordsworth [railed] against the idea of extracting knowledge from nature with “screws or levers,” and against the idea of a Newtonian universe made up of inert atoms that followed natural laws like automata. Instead, they saw nature as unified, dynamic, organic and thumping with life. Coleridge called for a new approach…
Humboldt’s idea of nature as a living organism animated by dynamic forces fell on fertile ground in England. It was the guiding principle and the leading metaphor for the Romantics. Humboldt’s works, [one reviewer wrote], were the best proof of the “secret bond” that united all knowledge, feeling and morality. Everything was connected…
…from the colonial administrators. The East India Company remained stubbornly uncooperative. Humboldt, however, continued to make detailed plans. He proposed to stay for four or five years in India, he told Wilhelm, and on his eventual return to Europe he would finally leave Paris. He intended to write his books about his Indian travels in English, and for that he would settle in London.
Some, such as Personal Narrative and the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, had few or no illustrations and were affordable for a wider audience, while others, such as Vues des Cordillères, with its stunning depictions of Latin America’s landscapes and monuments, were large volumes that cost a fortune. In its entirety, Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent would become the most expensive work ever privately published by a scientist. Humboldt had [spent a third of his inheritance on the expedition]…
…and about double that on his publications and life in Paris. None of this [seemed to bother] Humboldt. He took loans from friends and banks and mostly chose to ignore his financial situation, his debt growing steadily. While he was working on his books, Humboldt continued his preparations for India. He dispatched Carl Sigismund Kunth — the botanist, and the nephew of his old childhood tutor Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth — to Switzerland…
…and burned Bonpland’s farm in Santa Ana. On the orders of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, the men killed Bonpland’s workers and put him in chains. Francia accused Bonpland of agricultural espionage and feared that his flourishing plantation would be in competition with the Paraguayan yerba maté trade. Bonpland was dragged into Paraguay, where he was imprisoned. Old friends tried to help; Bolívar, who was by then…
…of isotherms — the lines that we see on weather maps today, and which connect different geographical points around the globe that are experiencing the same temperatures. Humboldt had come up with the design for his essay On Isothermal Lines and the Distribution of Heat on the Earth (1817) in order to visualize global climate patterns. The essay would help Lyell to form his own theories, and would also mark the beginning of a new understanding of climate.
[The king] had arrived in France from exile with a train of bitter Royalist émigrés who wanted to return to the old ways of the pre-revolutionary ancien régime. Humboldt had watched them coming back, and had seen how they burned with hate and a desire for revenge. “Their tendency to absolute monarchy is irresistible,” Charles Lyell had written to his father from Paris. Then, in 1820, the King’s nephew, the Duc de Berry, third in line [to the throne, was assassinated]…
…to understand the world in a completely new way. [Reading] the first [part of his] journal in October 1832, [his sister Caroline wrote] that “you had, probably from reading so much of Humboldt, got his phraseology and the kind of flowery French expressions which he uses.” Others were more complimentary, and told Darwin later how delighted they were with his vivid, Humboldt-like pictures. Humboldt showed Darwin how to investigate the natural world…
While Darwin had been in Chile, [Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act]. Though the slave trade had already been banned in 1807, this new act now prohibited slavery in most parts of the British Empire. The Darwin and Wedgwood families, who had long been part of the anti-slavery movement, were delighted — as of course was Humboldt, who had fiercely argued against the enslavement of fellow human beings ever since his Latin America expedition. Most important for Darwin, though, was…
…[the greatest] scientist of the age, graciously telling the thirty-year-old Darwin that he held the torch of science. Though forty years Darwin’s senior, Humboldt had immediately recognized a kindred spirit. Humboldt’s letter was not one of shallow compliments. Line after line, he commented on Darwin’s observations, quoting page numbers, listing examples and discussing arguments. Humboldt had read every page of Darwin’s account. Even better…
Back at home, Darwin immediately scribbled everything he could remember in his notebook, but he was unsure if he had understood the older scientist correctly. “Have two floras marched from opposite sides and met here? Strange case,” Darwin wrote. Darwin was thinking about and collecting material for his species theory… Darwin’s life ran “like clockwork,” as he said, built around the routine of work.
…not rushing to publish anything that was not solidly argued and underpinned with facts. Just as he had written a list of the pros and cons of marriage before proposing, so he would bring together everything related to his theory of evolution before presenting it to the world. If the two men had talked properly that day, perhaps Humboldt would have discussed his ideas of a world governed not by balance and stability but by dynamic change — thoughts that he would soon introduce…
It was more than just a collection of facts and knowledge, such as the Encyclopédie, for instance, because Humboldt was more interested in connections. Humboldt’s discussion of climate was just one example that revealed how different his approach was. Where other scientists focused only on meteorological data such as temperature and weather, Humboldt was the first to understand climate as a system of complex correlations between the atmosphere, oceans [and landmasses].
…organic life. The world was electrified. “If the Republic of Letters were to author its constitution,” one reviewer of Cosmos wrote, “and choose a sovereign, the intellectual sceptre would be offered to Alexander von Humboldt.” In the history of publishing, the book’s popularity was “epoch-making,” Humboldt’s German publisher announced — he had never seen so many orders, not even when Goethe had published his…
…establishing him as a household name across the North American continent. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first to obtain a copy. “The wonderful Humboldt,” he wrote in his journal, “with his extended centre and expanded wings, marches like an army, gathering all things as he goes.” No one, Emerson said, “knew more about nature than Humboldt.” Another American writer who loved Humboldt’s work was Edgar Allan Poe.
The 130-page prose poem Eureka, published in 1848, was dedicated to Humboldt and was a direct response to Cosmos. Eureka was Poe’s attempt to survey the universe, including all things spiritual and material, echoing Humboldt’s approach of including the external and the internal world. The universe, Poe wrote, was “the most sublime of poems.”
Equally inspired, Walt Whitman wrote his celebrated poetry collection Leaves of Grass with a copy of Cosmos on his desk. Whitman even composed a poem called “Kosmos” and proclaimed himself “a kosmos” in his famous poem “Song of Myself.” Humboldt’s Cosmos shaped two generations of American scientists, artists, writers and poets. And maybe most importantly, Cosmos was also responsible for…
…he lived in a small hut in the woods. He had done so, he said, because he wished “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Thoreau had built the single-room cabin with his own hands. At 10 by 15 feet, the small building had a window on each side and a fireplace with a small stove to heat the room. He had a bed, a small wooden desk and three chairs. When he sat on his doorstep, he could see the gently…
Some seven years after his return to Concord, Thoreau found it difficult to write the book, and it only became Walden as we know it today when he discovered a new world in Humboldt’s Cosmos. Humboldt’s view of nature gave Thoreau the confidence to weave together science and poetry. “Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth,” Thoreau later wrote. Walden was Thoreau’s answer to Cosmos.
It was in Concord that Thoreau met the writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had moved there three years previously. Fourteen years his senior, Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write, as well as opening his well-stocked library to him. It was on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond that Thoreau built his little cabin. At that time, Thoreau was grieving for his only brother John, who had died in his arms after a tetanus infection. Thoreau had been so traumatized by the [loss]…
…a sweeping victory for the United States, just as Thoreau had moved out of his cabin. Mexico ceded a vast territory that included the future states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and most of Arizona, as well as parts of Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. Under President James K. Polk, the country had expanded by more than a million square miles between 1845 and 1848, increasing by a third, and for the first time [stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific].
…[read] in Personal Narrative that the roar of the rapids of the Orinoco was louder at night than by day. He noted the same phenomenon in his journal — only that the thunderous Orinoco was a gurgling brook in Concord. To Thoreau’s mind, the hills that he had hiked at Peterborough in neighboring New Hampshire were comparable to the Andes, while the Atlantic became a large Walden Pond. Standing on the Concord cliffs, Thoreau…
…and changes of the seasons, Thoreau developed a deep perception of nature’s cycles and interrelationships. Once he’d realized that butterflies, flowers and birds reappear every spring, everything else made sense. “The year is a circle,” he wrote in April 1852. He began to compile long seasonal lists of leafing-out and flowering times. No one else, Thoreau insisted, had observed these intricate differences as he had. His journal would become “a book of the seasons,” he wrote, mentioning Humboldt in the same entry.
In Walden’s early drafts, Thoreau had concentrated on criticizing American culture and avarice, and what he saw as the increasing focus on money and urban life, using his life in the cabin as counterpoint.
…of science in 1853 were based on his admiration of Views of Nature — the book in which Humboldt had combined elegant prose and vivid descriptions with scientific analysis. All the great passages of Walden have their origin in Thoreau’s journals. Here, Thoreau jumped from one subject to the next, breathlessly engaging with nature — with earth as “living poetry,” with frogs that snore in the river, and with the joy…
Humboldt had plucked the word cosmos from ancient Greek, where it meant order and beauty — but one that was created through the human eye. With this, Humboldt brought together the external physical world with the internal world of the mind. Humboldt’s Cosmos was about the relationship between humankind and nature, and Thoreau placed himself firmly into this cosmos. At Walden Pond, he wrote, “I have… a little world all to myself.”
…[one of Walden’s] most famous passages, and encapsulates just how much Thoreau had changed since he read Humboldt. For years, every spring, Thoreau had observed the thawing of the sandy railway embankment near Walden Pond. As the sun warmed the frozen ground and melted the ice, streams of sand would be released and flow down, lacing the embankment with the shapes of leaves — a sandy foliage that preceded the leafing-out of the trees and shrubs in spring.
[Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes] was so sensational that long lines of keen visitors snaked around the block, waiting for hours to pay a 25-cent entrance fee to see the 5-by-10-foot canvas that depicted the Andes in all their glory. The river rapids in the center of the painting were so realistic that people could almost feel the spray of the water. Trees, leaves and flowers were all rendered so accurately that botanists were able to identify them precisely, while the snow-capped mountains…
…earlier, Church wrote to a friend that he planned to send the painting to Berlin to show “the old man the scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago.” [But Humboldt died before it could be sent.] In Germany, tens of thousands of mourners followed Humboldt’s state funeral procession from his apartment along Unter den Linden to Berlin Cathedral. Black flags fluttered in the wind and the streets were lined with people. The king’s horses pulled the hearse with the simple oak coffin…
…with festivities around the globe — in New York and Berlin, in Mexico City and Adelaide, and countless others. More than 20 years after Humboldt’s death, Darwin still called him “the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.” Darwin never stopped using Humboldt’s books. In 1881, aged 72, he picked up the third volume of Personal Narrative once again. When he was done, Darwin wrote “April 3rd”…
[Man had forgotten that] the earth was not given to him for consumption. The produce of the earth was squandered, Marsh argued, with wild cattle killed for their hides, ostriches for their feathers, elephants for their tusks and whales for their oil. Humans were responsible for the extinction of animals and plants, Marsh wrote in Man and Nature, while the unrestrained use of water was just another example of ruthless…
At the time, Haeckel was in Naples in Italy, where he hoped to make some discoveries that would kick-start his academic career. So far, the scientific part of the trip had turned out to be completely unsuccessful. He had come to study the anatomy of sea urchins, sea cucumbers and starfish, but it had been impossible to find enough living specimens in the Gulf of Naples. Instead of a rich sea harvest, it was the Italian landscape that offered what he called…
So why should we care? Over the past few years, many have asked me why I’m interested in Humboldt. There are several answers to that question, because there are many reasons why Humboldt remains fascinating and important. Not only was his life colorful and packed with adventure, but his story gives meaning to why we see nature the way we see it today. In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.
Humboldt’s disciples, and their disciples in turn, carried his legacy forward — quietly, subtly and sometimes unintentionally. Environmentalists, ecologists and nature writers today remain firmly rooted in Humboldt’s vision, although many have never heard of him.
Humboldt’s interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever. His belief in the free exchange of information, in uniting scientists and in fostering communication across disciplines — these are the pillars of science today. His concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking. One look at the latest 2014 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows us just how much we are in need of [it].
…people and ecosystems. Humboldt’s insight that social, economic and political issues are closely connected to environmental problems remains resoundingly topical. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said, “There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers.” Or, as the Canadian activist Naomi Klein declares in This Changes Everything (2014), the economic system…
…just as they were already doing with Earth. It feels as if we have come full circle. Maybe now is the moment for us, and for the environmental movement, to reclaim Alexander von Humboldt as our hero. Goethe compared Humboldt to a fountain with many spouts, from which streams flow refreshingly and infinitely, so that we only have to place vessels under them. That fountain, I believe, has never run dry.