The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

Today Goethe is famed for his literary works but he was a passionate scientist too, fascinated by the formation of the earth as well as botany. He had a rock collection that eventually numbered 18,000 specimens. As Europe descended into war, he quietly worked on comparative anatomy and optics. In the year of Humboldt’s first visit, he established a botanical garden at the University of Jena. He wrote an essay, the Metamorphosis of Plants, in which he argued that there was an archetypal, or primordial, form underlying the world of plants. The idea was that each plant was the variation of such an urform. Behind variety was unity. According to Goethe, the leaf was this urform, the basic shape from which all others had developed – the petals, the calyx and so on. ‘Forwards and backwards the plant is always nothing but leaf,’ he said.

That something of Humboldt was in Goethe’s Faust – or something of Faust in Humboldt – was obvious to many; so much so that people commented on the resemblance when the play was finally published in 1808.

There was one aspect that dampened Humboldt’s joy: the slave market opposite their rented house, in Cumaná’s main square. Since the early sixteenth century the Spanish had imported slaves to their colonies in South America and continued to do so. Every morning young African men and women were put on sale. They were forced to rub themselves with coconut oil to make their skin shiny black. They were then paraded for prospective buyers, who jerked open the slaves’ mouths to examine their teeth like ‘horses in a market’. The sight made Humboldt a life-long abolitionist.

Whenever I see things like this it reminds me what nonsense the argument is that implies that people of the time weren't capable of "modern" moral thoughts around human rights

It was here, at Lake Valencia, that Humboldt developed his idea of human-induced climate change. When he published his observations, he left no doubt what he thought: When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappearing with the brush-wood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course: and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil, and form those sudden inundations, that devastate the country.

Unlike most Europeans, Humboldt did not regard the indigenous people as barbaric, but instead was captivated by their culture, beliefs and languages. In fact, he talked about the ‘barbarism of civilised man’ 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’.

Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential for an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch, almost 200 years before the concept was named. For Humboldt the Mauritia palm was the ‘tree of life’ – the perfect symbol of nature as a living organism.

Humboldt would often be impressed by the accomplishments of the ancient civilizations. He transcribed manuscripts, sketched Inca monuments and collected vocabularies. The indigenous languages, Humboldt said, were so sophisticated that there wasn’t a single European book that could not be translated into any one of them. They even had words for abstract concepts such as ‘future, eternity, existence’. Just

In his trunks was the sketch of Chimborazo – his Naturgemälde. This one drawing and the ideas that had shaped it would change the way future generations perceived the natural world.

Humboldt was a ‘very extraordinary man’, Gallatin told his wife. Jefferson agreed – Humboldt was ‘the most scientific man of his age’.

Humboldt, though, never grew tired of condemning what he called ‘the greatest evil’. During his visit to Washington he didn’t quite dare to criticize the President himself, but he told Jefferson’s friend and architect William Thornton that slavery was a ‘disgrace’. Of course the abolition of slavery would reduce the nation’s cotton production, he said, but public welfare could not be measured ‘according to the value of its exports’. Justice and freedom were more important than numbers and the wealth of a few.

The similarities of their coastal plants, Humboldt wrote, showed an ‘ancient’ connection between Africa and South America as well as illustrating how islands that were previously linked were now separated – an incredible conclusion more than a century before scientists had even begun to discuss continental movements and the theory of shifting tectonic plates. Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others did books – and to him they revealed a global force behind nature, the movements of civilizations as well as of landmass. No one had ever approached botany in this

Personal Narrative followed Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s voyage chronologically from their departure from Spain in 1799.1 It was the book that would later inspire Charles Darwin to join the Beagle – and one ‘which I almost know by heart’, as Darwin said.

They also discussed Humboldt’s invention 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.1 Humboldt had come up with the design for his essay On the Isothermal Lines and the Distribution of Heat on the Earth (1817) in order to visualize global climate patterns.

‘Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible,’ he reminded them in his opening speech.

Yesss

Darwin modelled his own writing on Humboldt’s, fusing scientific writing with poetic description to such an extent that his journal of the Beagle voyage became remarkably similar in style and content to the Personal Narrative. So much so that his sister complained after receiving a first part of his journal in October 1832 ‘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’.

When the first copies came off the printing presses in mid-May 1839, Darwin sent one to Humboldt in Berlin. Not knowing where to direct his correspondence, Darwin asked a friend ‘for I know no more than if I had to write to the King of Prussia & the Emperor of all the Russias’. Nervous about sending the book to his idol, Darwin employed flattery and wrote in his covering letter that it had been Humboldt’s accounts of South America that had made him want to travel. He had copied out long passages from Personal Narrative, Darwin told Humboldt, so that ‘they might ever be present in my mind’.