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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Andrea Wulf
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July 3 - July 5, 2017
Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres.
No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.3 Humboldt finally arrived back in St Petersburg on 13
Determined to learn more about what he called the ‘mysterious march of the magnetic needle’, Humboldt now suggested the establishment of a chain of observation stations across the Russian Empire.
After his expedition in Russia, Humboldt also recommended that his fellow Germans, along with the British, French and American authorities, should all work together to collect more global data. He appealed to them as the members of a ‘great confederation’.
Almost two million observations would be taken in three years. Like today’s climate change scientists, those who worked at these new stations were collecting global data, participating in what we would now call a Big Science Project.
They spent Christmas in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) and on 28 December 1829 Humboldt arrived in Berlin, fizzing with so many ideas that he was ‘steaming like a pot full of boiling water’, a friend reported to Goethe.
‘My admiration of his famous personal narrative (part of which I almost know by heart),’ Darwin said, ‘determined me to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in her Majesty’s ship Beagle.’
At ninety feet long, the Beagle was a small ship, but packed to the rim – from thousands of tin cans filled with preserved meat to the latest surveying instruments. FitzRoy had insisted on taking as many as twenty-two chronometers to measure time and longitude, as well as lightning conductors to protect the ship. The Beagle carried sugar, rum and dried peas as well as the usual remedies against scurvy such as pickles and lemon juice. ‘The hold would contain scarcely another bag of bread,’ Darwin noted in admiration about the tight packing.
Like Humboldt and Bonpland on their arrival in Venezuela in 1799, Darwin’s mind was a ‘perfect hurricane of delight & astonishment’ as he examined volcanic rocks, pressed plants, dissected animals and pinned moths.
In it Lyell quoted Humboldt dozens of times, ranging from his idea of global climate and vegetation zones, to information about the Andes.
Throughout the Beagle’s voyage, Darwin was engaged in an inner dialogue with Humboldt – pencil in hand, highlighting sections in Personal Narrative.
Both Humboldt and Darwin had the rare ability to focus in on the smallest detail – from a fleck of lichen to a tiny beetle – and then to pull back and out to examine global and comparative patterns. This flexibility of perspective allowed them both to understand the world in a completely new way. It was telescopic and microscopic, sweepingly panoramic and down to cellular levels, and moving in time from the distant geological past to the future economy of native populations.
The other exciting news was the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in August 1834, while Darwin had been in Chile. Though the slave trade had already been banned in 1807, this new Act now prohibited slavery in most parts of the British Empire.
He wrote about plants, animals and geology but also about the colour of the sky, the sense of light, the stillness of the air and the haze of the atmosphere – like a painter with lively brushstrokes. Like Humboldt, Darwin recorded his emotional responses to nature, as well as providing scientific data and information about indigenous people.
If his own work had inspired a book like the Voyage of the Beagle, then that was his greatest success. ‘You have an excellent future ahead of you,’ he wrote. Here was the most famous 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.
As Darwin read Personal Narrative, he highlighted many of these examples.6 Why was it, Humboldt had asked, that the birds in India were less colourful than those in South America, or why was the tiger only found in Asia? Why were the great crocodiles so plentiful in the Lower Orinoco but absent from the Upper Orinoco? Darwin was fascinated by these examples and often added his own comments in the margins of his copy of Personal Narrative: ‘like Patagonia’, ‘in Paraguay’, ‘like Guanaco’ or sometimes just an affirmative ‘yes’ or ‘!’.
movement of plants could not be solved, Darwin took up the challenge. The science of plant and animal geography, Humboldt wrote, was not about ‘the investigation of the origin of beings’.
Seeds, eggs and spawn were produced in huge quantities but only a tiny fraction grew to maturity. There is no doubt that Malthus provided what Darwin called ‘a theory by which to work’, but the seeds of this theory had been sown much earlier when he had read Humboldt’s work.
Humboldt wrote in Personal Narrative: ‘The beasts of the forest retire to the thickets; the birds hide themselves beneath the foliage of the trees, or in the crevices of the rocks. Yet, amid this apparent silence, when we lend an attentive ear to the most feeble sounds transmitted by the air, we hear a dull vibration, a continual murmur, a hum of insects, that fill, if we may use the expression, all the lower strata of the air. Nothing is better fitted to make man feel the extent and power of organic life. Myriads of insects creep upon the soil, and flutter round the plants parched by the
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The title, Humboldt explained, came from the Greek word κόσμος – Kosmos – which meant ‘beauty’ and ‘order’, and which had also been applied to the universe as an ordered system.
And so, in 1834, the very year that the term ‘scientist’1 was first coined, heralding the beginning of the professionalization of the sciences and the hardening lines between different scientific disciplines, Humboldt began a book that did exactly the opposite. As science moved away from nature into laboratories and universities, separating itself off into distinct disciplines, Humboldt created a work that brought together all that professional science was trying to keep apart.
The advantage of this system was that he could collect materials for years, and when it came to writing, all he needed was to grab the relevant box or the envelope.
‘Luftmeer’ – air ocean, which was Humboldt’s beautiful term for the atmosphere –
Humboldt in a comical sketch that featured a brain stored in a jar from which people extracted ideas, and a ‘certain Prussian savant known for the unfailing fluidity of his speech’.
Bereft, Humboldt felt lonely and abandoned. ‘I never had believed that these old eyes had so many tears left,’ he wrote to an old friend. With Wilhelm’s death, he had lost his family and, as he said, ‘half of myself’.
After an early breakfast of black coffee – ‘concentrated sunshine’,
Humboldt was cheerful enough and paid him ‘some tremendous compliments’ but the old man just talked too much.
Where others insisted that nature was stripped of its magic as humankind penetrated into its deepest secrets, Humboldt believed exactly the opposite. How could this be, Humboldt asked, in a world in which the coloured rays of an aurora ‘unite in a quivering sea flame’, creating a sight so otherworldly ‘the splendour of which no description can reach’? Knowledge, he said, could never ‘kill the creative force of imagination’ – instead it brought excitement, astonishment and wondrousness.
Nature was a ‘living whole’ where organisms were bound together in a ‘net-like intricate fabric’.
But it was more than just a collection of facts and knowledge, such as Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie, for instance, because Humboldt was most interested in connections.
mentioned the word ‘God’. Yes, Humboldt’s nature was ‘animated by one breath – from pole to pole, one life is poured on rocks, plants, animals, and even into the swelling breast of man’,
Cosmos. The eye, Humboldt wrote, was the organ of ‘Weltanschauung’, the organ through which we view the world but also through which we interpret, understand and define it. At a time when imagination had been firmly excluded from the sciences, Humboldt insisted that nature couldn’t be understood in any other way. One look at the heavens, Humboldt said, was all it took: the brilliant stars ‘delight the senses and inspire the mind’, yet at the same
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’.
It was on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond that Thoreau built his little cabin.
felt like ‘a withered leaf’ – miserable, useless and so desolate that a friend had advised: ‘build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.’
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 extending across the whole continent.
He had long praised the pleasures of a simple life. ‘Simplify, simplify’, he would later write in Walden. To be a philosopher, he said, is to live ‘a life of simplicity’.
in his cabin. He often went to the village to have meals with his family at his parents’ house or with the Emersons.
Thoreau would follow Humboldt in his belief that the ‘whole’ could only be comprehended by understanding the connections, correlations and details. Emerson on the other hand believed that this unity could not be discovered through rational thought alone but also by intuition or through some kind of revelation from God. Like the Romantics in England such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the German Idealists such as Friedrich Schelling, Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists in America were reacting against scientific methods that were associated with deductive reasoning and empirical research.
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Thoreau completely reoriented his life with a new daily routine that required serious study every morning and evening, punctuated by a long afternoon walk.
ideas of nature and instead observed the detailed variety that unfolded on his walks. This was also the moment when Thoreau first immersed himself in Humboldt’s writings – at the same time as he was turning against the influence of Emerson. ‘I feel ripe for something,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal. ‘It is seed time with me – I have lain fallow long enough.’
What Humboldt had observed across the globe, Thoreau did at home. Everything was interwoven. When the ice-cutters came to the pond in winter in order to prepare and transport the ice to distant destinations, Thoreau thought of those who would consume it far away in the sweltering heat in Charleston or even in Bombay and Calcutta.
What kind of science was this, Thoreau asked, ‘which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination’? This was what Humboldt had written about in Cosmos.
Over the next few years he doubled the book’s original length, filling it with the scientific observations he had made. With that Walden became a completely different book from the one he had set out to write.
‘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.
Thoreau watched the delicate crystalline structures and compared them to the perfectly symmetrical petals of flowers. The same law, he said, that shaped the earth also shaped the snowflakes, pronouncing with emphasis, ‘Order. Kosmos.’
Humboldt had plucked the word Kosmos 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,
reactionary politics, a wave of revolutions swept across the continent. When economic decline and the suppression of political gatherings sparked violent protests in Paris, a terrified King Louis Philippe abdicated on 26 February, and escaped to Britain. Two days later, the French declared the Second Republic and within weeks more revolutions rippled through Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Belgium, among others.
On 18 March, the revolutionaries in Berlin rolled barrels into the streets, and piled up boxes, planks and bricks to build barricades. They dug up cobblestones and carried them on to the roofs, preparing themselves for a fight. As day turned into evening, the battle began. Stones and tiles
On 21 March, only three days after the fighting had begun, the king displayed his defeat symbolically by riding through Berlin draped in the black, red and gold colours of the revolutionaries.
