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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Andrea Wulf
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July 3 - July 5, 2017
Former President John Adams thought the prospect of South American democracy a laughable idea – as absurd as establishing democracy ‘among birds, beasts and fishes’.
Thomas Jefferson repeated his fears of despotism. How, he asked Humboldt, was a ‘priest-ridden’ society going to establish a republican and free government? Three centuries of Catholic rule, Jefferson insisted, had turned the colonists into ignorant children and ‘enchained their minds’.
He hoped that the colonies would not unite as one nation but remain separate countries because as a ‘single mass they would be a very formidable neighbor’.
Damn
The volumes made several points very clear: colonialism was disastrous for people and the environment; colonial society was based on inequality; the indigenous people were neither barbaric nor savages, and the colonists were as capable of scientific discoveries, art and craftsmanship as the Europeans; and the future of South America was based on subsistence farming and not on monoculture or mining.
The man who had been granted rare permission by Carlos IV to explore the Spanish Latin American territories went on to publish a harsh criticism of the colonial rule. His book was filled, Humboldt told Jefferson, with the expressions of his ‘independent sentiments’.
These scathing indictments of colonialism and slavery showed how everything was interrelated: climate, soils and agriculture with slavery, demographics and economics. Humboldt
He was also the only ruler and politician who promised to help Bolívar. When Pétion pledged arms and ships in exchange for the promise to free the slaves, Bolívar agreed. ‘Slavery,’ he said, ‘was the daughter of darkness.’
was a bold move at a time when apparently enlightened American statesmen, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, still had hundreds of slaves working their plantations. Humboldt, who had been a staunch abolitionist since seeing
No other place in the world had been ‘so bountifully provided by nature’,
Too bountifully provided
Within five years more than 5,000 soldiers – the so-called British Legions – arrived in South America from Britain and Ireland together with some 50,000 rifles and muskets as well as hundreds of tons of munitions.
‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’. It was his allegory for the liberation of Latin America.
‘I grasp the eternal with my hands,’ he cries, and ‘feel the infernal prisons boiling beneath my footsteps’.
Almost 1 million square miles of South America were under his leadership – an area much bigger than Napoleon’s empire had ever been.
This idea, however, could also be applied quite differently, as several European scientists had done. Since the mid- eighteenth century some thinkers had insisted on the ‘degeneracy of America’. One such was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in the 1760s and 1770s had written that in America all things ‘shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land’.
Buffon’s theories on degeneracy had only become popular because they ‘flattered the vanity of Europeans’.
Bolívar said. Humboldt had presented the natural world as a reflection of South America’s identity – a portrait of a continent that was strong, vigorous and beautiful.
One soon grows tired of forests and fields; I never envied any bird its wings. But the pursuit of intellectual things From book to book, from page to page – what joy that yields!
A cautionary tale = how nerds are born
How had the English ever become ‘great with so little day light’, Richard Rush, the American Minister in London, wondered.
What interested Humboldt most was Herschel’s idea of an evolving universe – one that was not solely based on mathematics but a living thing that changed, grew and fluctuated. Herschel had used an analogy of a garden when he wrote of ‘the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption’ of stars and planets to explain their formation.
Humboldt would use exactly the same image years later when he wrote of the ‘great garden of the universe’ in which stars appeared in various stages, just like ‘a tree in all stages of growth’.
By contrast, Humboldt took his readers into the crowded streets of Caracas, across the dusty plains of the Llanos and deep into the rainforest along the Orinoco. As he described a continent that few British had ever seen, Humboldt captured their imagination.
Heinrich Faust saw how everything hung together: ‘How it all lives and moves and weaves / Into a whole! Each part gives and receives,’
Coleridge was lamenting the loss of what he called the ‘connective powers of the understanding’. They lived in an ‘epoch of division and separation’, of fragmentation and the loss of unity. The problem, he insisted, lay with philosophers and scientists such as René Descartes or Carl Linnaeus, who had turned the understanding of nature into a narrow practice of collecting, classification or mathematical abstraction.
representatives from Buenos Aires hoped Bonpland would establish a botanic garden there. Bonpland’s knowledge of potentially useful plants held economic possibilities for the new nations. Just as the British had founded a botanical garden in Calcutta as a storehouse for the empire and for useful crops, so was the Argentinians’ plan.
The revolutionaries were trying to lure European scientists to Latin America. Science was like a nation without borders, it united people and – so they hoped – would place an independent Latin America on an equal footing with Europe.
Wilhelm summed it up when he said: ‘Alexander always envisages things as being huge, and then not even half of it happens.’
Charles Babbage, the mathematician hailed today as the father of the computer.
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. The essay would help Lyell to form his own theories, and also marked the beginning of a new understanding of climate – one on which all subsequent studies about the distribution of heat were based.
The German chemist Justus von Liebig, who would later become famous for his discovery of the importance of nitrogen as a plant nutrient, recounted how meeting Humboldt in Paris had ‘laid the foundation of my future career’.
Today Gallatin is regarded as the founder of American ethnology; the reason for his interest, Gallatin wrote, was ‘the request of a distinguished friend, Baron Alexander von Humboldt’.
The man who had written thirty years previously that ‘court life robs even the most intellectual of their genius and freedom’, now found himself bound to royal routine.
He had, as one colleague said, the ‘enviable talent for constituting himself the centre of intellectual and scientific converse’.
In private the Austrian Chancellor described Humboldt as ‘a head that’s gone politically awry’ while Humboldt called Metternich a ‘mummy’s sarcophagus’ because his policies were so antiquated.
His pan-American congress in the summer of 1826 had only been attended by four of the Latin American republics.
course South America owed a great deal to Bolívar but his authoritarian ways were ‘illegal, unconstitutional and somewhat like that of Napoleon’, as Humboldt told a Colombian scientist and diplomat.
By not charging any entry fee, Humboldt democratized science: his packed audiences ranged from the royal family to coachmen, from students to servants, from scholars to bricklayers – and half of those attending were women.
With his gentle voice Humboldt took his audience on a journey through the heavens and deep seas, across the earth, up the highest mountains and then back to a tiny fleck of moss on a rock. He talked about poetry and astronomy but also about geology and landscape painting. Meteorology, the history of the earth, volcanoes and the distribution of plants were all part of his lectures. He roamed from fossils to the northern lights, and from magnetism to flora, fauna and the migration of the human race. The lectures were a portrait of a vivid kaleidoscope of correlations that spanned the entire
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Only Alexander, she said, could present such ‘wonderful depth’ with a lightness of touch.
Unlike previous such meetings at which scientists had endlessly presented papers about their own work, Humboldt put together a very different programme. Rather than being talked at, he wanted the scientists to talk with each other. There were convivial meals and social outings such as concerts and excursions to the royal menagerie on the Pfaueninsel in Potsdam. Meetings were held among botanical, zoological and fossil collections as well as at the university and the botanical garden.
He envisaged an interdisciplinary brotherhood of scientists who would exchange and share knowledge. ‘Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible,’ he reminded them in his opening speech.
And though theories of shifting tectonic plates would only be confirmed in the mid-twentieth century, Humboldt had already discussed in 1807 in the Essay on the Geography of Plants that the continents of Africa and South America had once been connected. Later he wrote that the reason for this continental shift was ‘a subterranean
Much as Alexander looked at nature as an interconnected whole, so Wilhelm too was examining language as a living organism. Language, like nature, Wilhelm believed, had to be placed in the wider context of landscape, culture and people.
According to Wilhelm’s radical new theory, different languages reflected different views of the world. Language was not just a tool to express thoughts but it shaped thoughts – through its grammar, vocabulary, tenses and so on. It was not a mechanical construct of individual elements but an organism, a web that wove together action, thought and speaking.
Nothing was quite as Humboldt wanted it. The entire expedition was a compromise. It was a journey paid for by Tsar Nicholas I who hoped to learn what gold, platinum and other valuable metals might be mined more efficiently from his vast empire.
In the mines of Brazil, for example, diamonds had often been found in gold and platinum deposits.
Humboldt’s predictions were proved correct. Though he knew that his guess had been based on hard scientific data, to many this seemed so mysterious that they believed he had dabbled in magic.
His team was astounded at how the fifty-nine-year-old could walk for hours ‘without any sign of fatigue’, dressed always in a dark frock coat with a white necktie and a round hat.
The Siberian Highway was as good as the best roads in Europe. They travelled faster, Humboldt proudly noted, than any European express courier.
They had to pick up their carriages at the fortress in Ust-Kamenogorsk and then turn west along the southern edge of the Russian Empire, passing Omsk, Miass and Orenburg, a journey of around 3,000 miles, following the border that separated Russia from China. The border, a long line of 2,000 miles dotted with stations, watchtowers and small fortresses manned by Cossacks along the Kazakh Steppe, was the home of the nomadic Kyrgyz.
Today we know that there are multiple reasons for the changing water levels. One factor is the amount of water coming in from the Volga which is tied to the rainfall of a huge catchment region – all of which in turn relates to the atmospheric conditions of the North Atlantic. Many scientists now believe that these fluctuations reflect climatic changes in the northern hemisphere, making the Caspian Sea an important field of study for climate change investigations.
