Alexander von Humboldt

The introductory article Plant People sets the scene for the selection of plant people described in this series of articles, placing them within a global and plant science context.  For a more extended discussion of changes in the form and context of plant study over time see the history of plant science. 

Introduction – Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was born (in the same year as Napoleon) into a wealthy aristocratic Prussian family.^[17] As a child and young man, like Joseph Banks, he shunned the traditional European classical education of the day to indulge his insatiable interest in the natural world – collecting, sketching, and classifying plants, animals, insects, shells, and rocks – activities that earned him the sobriquet ‘little apothecary’. His preoccupation led, in adulthood, to the life of a polymath as he amassed and synthesized his encyclopaedic knowledge in a manner reminiscent of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (Natural History) and Diderot’s Encyclopédie – but as a compendium of mostly geography-related knowledge. Like so many others, he had read, and been inspired by, the accounts of global circumnavigators James Cook and Louis de Bougainville.

His research was as a geographer, naturalist, and explorer, his work steeped in both Enlightenment thinking, and its reaction, the Romantic movement. Friedrich Schelling, aged 23, had become philosophy professor at Jena, writing the influential Naturphilosophie which became the foundation of German Idealism and Romanticism. Emphasis was on the unity of nature, the interplay of the subjective and objective, and nature as an organism rather than a machine, all part of Humboldt’s vision.

His work on mostly botanical geography laid the foundation for the new study of biogeography, and his systematic geophysical measurement foreshadowed modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. These were the methods he applied on his most famous travels between 1799 and 1804 when, with botanist Aimée Bonpland, he explored the Americas. His work of 21 years was published in five volumes and many translations.

Bonpland, later, worked as head gardener to Napoleon’s wife Josephine at Malmaison where he grew some of his South American seeds and published, in 1813, a list of Josephines outstanding plant collections. Tardy in producing plant descriptions of the South American expedition Humboldt handed over this task to Karl Sigismund Kunth.

The setting for Humboldt’s ideas was, in part, an obvious product of the intellectual climate of his day. In 1794, at Weimar, his brother Wilhelm had formed an intense relationship with both Goethe (another polymath and Germany’s most famous literary celebrity) and the poet Schiller. The pre-Romantic period of Sturm und Drang, a celebration of individuality and human emotion as reaction to dry Enlightenment reason had passed and Goethe’s preoccupation with literature and poetry had taken on a scientific flavour. Wilhelm Humboldt piqued Goethe’s scientific curiosity while he enjoyed Goethe’s company, including the house, library, geological collection, and garden. Goethe had, the same year, founded a botanical garden in Jena and his book Metamorphosis of Plants promoted the idea of an archetypal plant or urform – a basic plan from which all plant life derived. Reminiscent of evolutionary ideas his speculation was intellectually tantalizing along with his speculations concerning external and internal formative forces.^[7] Other meetings followed in subsequent years as German Idealism and Romanticism blossomed.

Brother Alexander’s writing displayed his Enlightenment upbringing and his Romantic philosophy, the connection between reason and emotion — between the scientific study of nature, and its influence on the human imagination.

Alexander von Humboldt is credited with extending the scope of geography by laying the foundations of physical geography, meteorology, and biogeography. For botanists his major work was the first volume of his 34-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. This first volume was titled Essay on the Geography of Plants (dedicated to Goethe) and it contained his most famous illustration, the Naturgemälde, first sketched at the foot of Mt Chimborazo and illustrating, in watercolour 3′ x 2′, the zonation of plants as influenced by environmental factors. As he stated himself; this was an academic work that moved away from the static world of morphology – of plant description and classification – and into the dynamic world of interaction and change: the first significant venturing into ecology, soon to be associated with the physiological botany of the more sedentary laboratory German academic botanists.

From November 1827 to April 1828, at the University of Berlin, he delivered 61 extremely popular lectures on his life’s work. These were so well-attended that a second series of free lectures was announced, to be given in a vast music hall with an audience of thousands. These lectures helped him formulate the main ideas for his masterpiece ‘Kosmos’ named using a Greek word, attributed to Pythagorus, referring to the universe as ‘a beautifully ordered and harmonious system’. Humboldt’s ‘Kosmos’ was translated into all major languages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, in over 30 volumes and many translations. In Kosmos he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This presented the world as an integrated organismic-like whole where ‘no single fact can be considered in isolation’ but only as part of the interconnected web of life.^[3]

Famous figures of the past, like Humboldt, have been so rigorously researched by historians and chroniclers that little can now be be added concerning their lives. For this reason, I have confined the account of his life to a brief timeline. A fuller account of his travels, publications, private life, and a list of sources is available in Wikipedia’s Alexander von Humboldt. I have tried to emphasize the challenge and novelty of his ideas, especially in relation to the botany of his day.

The most comprehensive and readable contemporary biographic account in English is The Invention of Nature (2015) written by historian Andrea Wulf and compulsory reading for biologists interested in the history of their science.

Von Humboldt has been included in my list of special people, not just because he was a giant of natural history, but mostly for his relevance to themes pursued on this web site – themes that are pertinent to today: plant geography and landscape change, purpose in nature, the contemporary influence of physical reductionism, the use of analysis and synthesis as alternative scientific methods, biological and social globalization, and the multidisciplinary connectedness of all things as perceived by the human mind.

In typical 19th century tradition he was a prodigious worker and communicator (c. 50,000 letters)^[2] well-connected with society in Europe’s major cities of Paris and Berlin.

Like us all, Humboldt was flawed. Hooker who was an ardent admirer who had been supported by Humboldt in his expedition to the Himalayas. Knowing Humboldt’s impressive history of intrepid exploration, he anticipated, on meeting him, a giant of both body and intellect. He encountered a relatively small and plump man of 5’8” who no longer exhibited his former youthful wiry agility. Humboldt dominated conversations with everyone he met, allowing little time for discussion, or even the politeness to listen to others’ views. He was, nevertheless, a public inspiration who espoused the values of a liberal humanitarian . . . magnanimous, noted for his respect of indigenous peoples (vocally anti-colonial), fascinated by their languages and culture, and despising their maltreatment as ‘savages’ by colonizing countries. Despite his initial wealth and privilege, he strongly resisted slavery and greed. He admired America as the world’s first free republic untainted by monarchy and despots.

Historical context

Von Humboldt was born into an ascendant Prussia that did not defer to France and the industrializing Britain. Prussia had high literacy that was supported by numerous universities, libraries, and quality publications that first contributed, and then led, the advance of European science. This was also a time when Jefferson’s (president from 1801 to 1809) America, was flourishing, its economy benefitting from European conflicts during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).

Historian Wulf points out that Humboldt angered his peers by choosing to spend his first years back in Europe in Paris. Here, in the second largest city in Europe after London, he found that the thinking was more liberal; the role of the Catholic Church was reduced so academics were not bound by its tenets; the Jardin des Plantes and Natural History Museum (where he met Georges Cuvier and transmutationist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) were rejuvenated and brimming with Napoleon’s trophies of the natural world taken during his expeditions; Paris was Europe’s publishing centre and ideal for the promotion of his work.

From Paris Humboldt added his own chapter to the history of botany when German plant science led the world as Germany, in effect, extended the subject of plant study from ‘botany’ (nomenclature, description, classification) to ‘plant science’ (physiology, laboratory experimentation, ecology, and so on).

German 19th century Botany

Germany in the time of Humboldt was making a major contribution to the history of plant science in a period of German botanical ascendancy that warrants further discussion.

Science – 1809-1851

After an Age of Revolutions and the Napoleonic wars, science flourished as never before, facilitated by the technology of industrial capitalism and spawning new academic disciplines as collective learning blossomed. Science was now passing through a period of professionalization with a multiplication of specialized journals, and an increase in international networking. From the 1820s botany was becoming more clearly a collective activity, rather than a pursuit of dedicated individuals.

German botany

18th century science was led by France which provided generous government support. The Jardin des Plantes was reconfigured as the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1793, with botany to the fore. Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian army at Jena in 1806 had injected French intellectual influence as German science surpassed that of its French neighbour to rival that in Britain where botanists were still locked into descriptive and systematic botany recording and exploiting the flora of its colonial empire.

State-sponsored universities in Germany (the University of Berlin was founded in 1807-1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s brother) supported dedicated professional scientists and botanists that could explore new horizons. Natural science was given equal status with theology, law, and medicine.

There were simply more professors and lecturers (Dozenten) in botany in Germany than in any other country. In the 18th century chairs of botany were often still subordinate to medical teaching; indeed Goethe tells us that at Jena the chair of botany was regarded as a perquisite of the senior medical chair and no botanical courses were ever given, until Goethe himself induced the incumbent of the time to give one. But in the 19th century the position was quite different, and botany in almost every German university was treated as an independent discipline. Other factors in the upsurge in German botany were the close links between botany and agriculture in Germany, and the growth of the German optical industry which made available excellent, but much cheaper, microscopes.

 

This flowering of German botany, especially its physiology, occurred while all the resources of Kew, the British Museum, Glasgow, and Edinburgh were concentrated on the floristic exploitation of the British Dependencies.^[14]

The botanical trajectory of von Humboldt’s career was influenced by the pharmacist-botanist Carl Ludwig Willdenow (1765 – 1812), considered one of the founders of phytogeography. His Grundriss der Kräuterkunde or Geschichte der Pflanzen (1792) was an account of plant distribution, albeit in accord with a literal biblical interpretation of history. Willdenow was director of the Botanical Garden of Berlin from 1801 until his death in 1812, its herbarium housing >20,000 of Willdenow’s plant specimens. von Humboldt had visited the garden in his youth and fallen under Willdenow’s spell. In 1807 the garden received many of von Humboldt’s South American plant collections which were keenly studied by Willdenow.

Botany was revitalized in the mid-19th century with the 1842 German publication of the first modern-era botany textbook. This was by M.J. Schleiden (1804–1881) in Berlin and translated into English as Principles of Scientific Botany. The content introduced the latest research in plant chemistry: the absorption of carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia; the detailed analysis of plant morphology treated developmentally; and it began with a new emphasis on ‘cell theory’ , proceeding to the physiology of absorption, assimilation, excretion, motion, and reproduction. The discussion included consideration of the increase in somatic complexity observed in the transition from algae and fungi to mosses and liverworts, ferns, then ‘higher’ plants.

Anatomy

Among the outstanding German botanists was C.F. Wolff. His studies of plant anatomy inspired future developments by both French and German botanists, notably compatriot J.J.P. Moldenhawer who first determined conclusively that the plant body was comprised entirely of cells of various kinds. He provided a full account of secondary thickening and growth rings in dicotyledons, and the structure of stomata.

Systematics

Advances in systematics in the early 1800s are associated with England’s Robert Brown^[15] whose most important theoretical contribution was his interpretation of floral development and the floral organs as modified leaves and, in 1827, a microscopic study of the development of ovules – naked in the Gymnosperms and enclosed in the Angiosperms. Further advances were made by France’s Auguste de Candolle who noted the positional uniformity of diverse organs during development, which he called ‘symmetry’.

Britain, meanwhile, was absorbed in the completion of an inventory of its imperial flora.

Fertilization

Following the confirmation by Camerarius of pollen as the male component in plant reproduction, the anatomical description of fertilization was given by Frenchmen J.B. Amici and A. Brongniart while Robert Brown completed pioneering studies on the cell nucleus and confirmed its presence in all cells. Between 1827 and 1838 K.F. Gaertner, the son of Josef Gaertner extended the work of Koelreuter, working on hybridization.

The motile cells of lower plants were first observed in the 1820s and in 1844 Naegeli described the development of antheridia on the fern prothallus and work on a more detailed study of fertilization in higher plants began, to be synthesized by Wilhelm Hofmeister (1824-1877) as the ground-breaking ‘alternation of generations’ that he recognized as occurring across the plant kingdom, demonstrating the shared features of reproduction and morphology supporting Darwin’s claims to common descent.

Physiology

An awakening of interest in plant nutrition and physiology was fostered by Schlieden leading to pioneering work by exceptional German plant physiologists including von Mohl, Julius Sachs and others as chemistry (a science making major contributions to industry at this time) was added to the experimental palette. Schleiden’s approach was a revolutionary relegation of the old static structural systematics (nomenclature, classification, description) to a new and dynamic world of function and process (physiology and development) that all began with a study of the cell.

Discoveries and spin-offs of the new approach included the geotropism of T.A. Knight in 1806, the description of osmosis of Frenchman R.J.H. Dutrochet.

Agriculture

The application of new research to agriculture was evident in Englishman Humphrey Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Science (first edition 1813), a textbook used across Europe for several decades. This was followed and greatly improved by German Julius Liebig’s Die Organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agriculture und Physiologie (1840) which was reprinted and updated many times which led to the important confirmation, by Boussingault, of plant nitrogen assimiliation from nitrates. Liebig also established the significance of potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphate and sulphate in plant nutrition.

With the appearance in 1851 of von Mohl’s comparative study of the plant cell, and Hofmeister’s researches establishing an alternation of generations in higher plants, a unitary theory of plant structure, development, and reproduction, was completed in its main outlines.^[16]

Achievements

Some measure of the scope of Humboldt’s interest can be gained by simply listing some of his discoveries and achievements. In essence, he laid the foundation for the field of biogeography (vegetation and climate zones, most notably the connection between altitude, temperature and vegetation), and modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. He invented isotherms (1817) and related climatic patterns to continents. His account, in Kosmos, of the propagation of seismic waves became the basis of modern seismology

He discovered the magnetic equator and by measuring the magnetism of rocks in the Alps, he found that Earth’s magnetic field reverses its polarity; he extended the study of vulcanology; collected many species unknown to European science; discovered the connection between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers; introduced the examination of the quotient of extremes into population statistics; described what is now known eponymously as the Humboldt current – a cold, low-salinity ocean current that flows north along the western coast of South America, past Chile and Peru, as a highly productive ecosystem; Investigated the origin of tropical storms and pioneered investigation of atmospheric disturbances in higher latitudes; he observed the preparation of curare; noted the influence on malaria of quinine from the tree Cinchona pubescens.

He was the first to describe a forest’s supply of oxygen, moisture storage, cooling, water retention and resistance to soil erosion and their relation to climate; he initiated the idea of the ‘web of life’; he was the first to discuss harmful human-induced climate change, at first in 1800 and then again in 1831; he was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular) based, in part, on the similarity of their coastal floras (anticipating the theory of continental drift); he was the first person to map areas of equal air temperature and pressure, a technique now used in every weather forecast around the world; he was the first European to approach the summit of Mt Chimborazo (while also measuring the air pressure); first person to connect altitude sickness to a lack of oxygen, due to his many mountain climbs and his own personnel experiences at high altitudes; was a skillful exponent of powerful infographics; he anticipated the field of ecology (analyzing, for example, the complex relationships between logging and river ecology; he was a major stimulus to conservation biology.

He coined the words ‘permafrost’, and ‘cosmography’.

When eventually published in its entirety, Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent ‘would become the most expensive work ever privately published by a scientist’.^[8]

Unsurprisingly many species, geographic, and astronomical features, and places commemorate his name.

Kosmos

Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (Kosmos – Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung), began as a lecture series delivered by Humboldt at the University of Berlin, and was published in five volumes between 1845 and 1862 (the fifth was posthumous, completed from Humboldt’s notes).

In the first volume of Kosmos, Humboldt gives an outline of nature, describing outer space and the Earth.

In the second volume he describes the history of science including poetry and art. This was a popular book read by scientist and layman alike. Kosmos presented the world in a similar fashion to some of the cosmologies of the ancient Greeks . . . as an orderly and harmonious place subject to eternal laws that defeat chaos.

Darwin and Hooker eagerly shared a single copy of the first (poor) English translation. Prince Albert demanded a copy, Romantic French composer Hector Berlioz read his copy between opera performances etc. ‘By 1849, some 40,000 English copies had been sold^[5] to which can be added many thousands of copies sent to America, influencing writers like Henry David Thoreau and his Walden and the world-influencing conservation ethic of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (see Wulf 2016).

Humboldt extolled the beauty of the cosmos that is the source of human awe. Today we might support his view by pointing out our close association with the universe through the composition of our bodies, truly made of stardust, the origin of organic from the inorganic, and the development of the entire community of life from a common ancestor. None of this was scientifically known when Humboldt wrote his Kosmos.

Volume one sold out in two months, and was translated into most European languages. Kosmos, regarded by some as unduly influenced by the Romantic movement, provided a unifying perspective on the studies of science, nature, and mankind.

Today Humboldt confronts us with the question of where the emphasis of scientific research should lie. By drilling deeper into matter with genomics and particle physics we see clear practical advantages from this reductive approach. But then we also have the legacy of Humboldt. This is the more synthetic approach of ecology and ecosystems, conservation, and the environmental movement that looks at the big picture, the biosphere and the global problems that confront us in the 21st century. We need both approaches, but in the face of climate change and a host of other problems in global ecology we can be grateful for Humboldt’s contribution to scientific synthesis.

The ideas

Given such popularity in his day, Wulf acknowledges that, in the English-speaking world, Humboldt is now largely forgotten, and that this requires explanation.

He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialized fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry, and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the 20th century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force. ^[1]

Part of this neglect by anglophone intellectuals is the anti-German sentiment spawned by two World Wars. But Wulf is closer to the mark, I believe, when she draws attention to the character of science that followed him. Our times are still the product of a deeply ingrained deference to analysis as the only acceptable scientific modus operandi. A deep-seated suspicion of anything large-scale has pushed aside holistic thinking like that of Humboldt. All-embracing theories in science, like grand theories and ideologies in politics, might lead us into dangerous places. Scientific laurels have been awarded to thorough investigations of parts of systems rather than the systems themselves. A grand Weltenschauung – like one investigating the connections between climate, geography, nature, and human societies – is too diffuse. The scientific generalist who has not contributed to lawlike first principles is thus associated with speculative superficiality, fanciful dabbling, conjecture, and therefore scientific mediocrity. Despite his endless measurements the breadth of Humboldt’s work ran counter to the scientific tenor of the day.

With the subsequent intensification of analysis has come, as Wulf points out, a disciplinary specialization that draws sharp boundaries ‘between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, between fact and value’. This is an approach that, by its very nature, narrows perspectives and discourages the development of multidisciplinary overviews, worldviews, and syntheses. We are still in the thrall of this approach to science as we drill ever deeper into minutiae with a detached objectivity that, sadly, stifles our sense of wonder.

Like Darwin, and Aristotle before him, Humboldt’s vision was broad ‘. . . telescopic and microscopic, sweepingly panoramic and down to cellular levels . . .’ ^[9]

Analysis & synthesis

Both analysis and synthesis, seemingly opposed methods, have their place in science. This topic is addressed elsewhere. But, more urgently, we desperately need now, more than ever, a clear understanding of nature in its entirety, of the biosphere. Humbolt treated the application of the notion of objectivity in its old and former sense, as placing an object within its natural context.

This is why Humboldt was important. It was he, more than any other scientist, who grasped and passed on to others the sense of nature as a whole with humans as its interpreters. He anticipated the science of ecology, the environmental movement, globalization, and the absolute need for what we would now call three pillars of sustainability – the cooperative integration of social, economic, and environmental factors – that are necessary for the effective management of the Earth for future generations. Anticipating James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis he experienced a Romantic epiphany, viewing the world from the summit of Mt Chimborazo as a ’. . . a single, weblike, interconnected organism’.

Part & whole

We cannot experience everything, all-at-once: it is in our nature to constantly select in order to survive. Science, too, has followed the path of particularization: we see how things work by taking them apart. We intuitively know, even scientifically, that there is always a wider picture that must be taken for granted. Philosophically it has long been acknowledged that scientific statements about the world should, ideally, carry a ceteris paribus (other things being equal) clause. The idea that ‘everything is connected’; that there is a ‘web or network of connection between everything’ that all individual facts fit into a wider system of knowledge’, that the naming of a ‘part’ demands its explanation in terms of a ‘whole’.

Humboldt’s contribution was to resist the analytic mode of thinking to see how the parts so often studied by science – the species and individuals of biology – were related: not just to one-another but to the rest of the world. He was a synthesizer. Humboldt recognized his debt to philosopher compatriot Immanuel Kant who believed that there was an underlying causal unity in nature and that Earth should be viewed as a single, interconnected whole – views that were echoed in Humboldt’s words ‘. . . nothing can be considered in isolation’ . . . ‘. . . nature, despite her seeming diversity, is always a unity . . .’ Kant also delivered a blow to the assumption that humans can observe the world with total objective detachment by noting the necessity for ‘predispositions of the mind’ that influence our understanding of ‘reality‘. Romantics seized on the excitement of travel, novelty, and creative imagination.

Botanists in the period preceding Humboldt had spent much of their time in the naming, classification, and description of plants. Their concerns were largely those of the static structure of individual organisms and their parts. The pendulum of plant science was now swinging away from static structures towards dynamic processes, functions, and relationships . . . from morphology and taxonomy, to physiology and ecology (a term that would only be used over a century later) – the reasons for the particular distributions of organisms in place and space.

This new biology was indeed science of a more demanding experimental character, and it was German plant physiology that led the world. One year after Humboldt died, Darwin would extended the study of function and process with his investigations of long-term historical change by biological adaptation.

Unification of nature

Humboldt’s vision was of an interconnected and interdependent world that unified and integrated the physical, biological, and social sciences – all viewed through the lens of human perception, curiosity, and wonder. This was being ‘objective’ in an early historical sense as ‘placing objects within their natural context’. or, as Humbolt and others appreciated: a full explanation of parts must include their relation to the whole.

Humboldt draws our attention to the subtle distinction between the unification of nature, and the unification of science. Today we know that ‘all must be connected’ in the natural world, but scientific explanation (our best representation of this hyperconnectivity) falls short as we struggle with the idea of a unified science. This is evident in everything from the absence of a unified field theory to the confusion of the relationship between the various disciplines that bear the epithet ‘science’. This is a central dilemma addressed elsewhere.

Foundations of biogeography

Humboldt is associated with the foundation of modern geography as the first exponent of the classical period of physical geography and biogeography, especially plant biogeography.

The first appointment to the chair of geography at the University of Berlin (founded by Humboldt’s brother Wilhelm and opened in 1810) was Carl Ritter (1779-1859), in 1825. Ritter is remembered for his publication Die Erkunde (Geography). Ritter was a theoretician while Humboldt was a predominantly ‘field’ geographer. The pair are regarded as co-founders of the modern academic geography that would spread to Paris and other parts of Europe in the 1870s. Humboldt is associated with that part of physical geography now known as biogeography, which included his theories on magnetism, volcanicity, seismology, and tectonics.

The death of both Ritter and A. Humboldt in the same year, 1859, coincided with the publication of  Darwin’s On the Origin of Species . . ., which marked the end of the classical period of geography. Humboldt, and his holistic approach to nature, was eclipsed by the magnitude of Darwin’s ideas, even though Darwin would probably have not visited South America but for is admiration of Humboldt’s accounts. Humboldt’s work was followed by a period of analytical specialization as science fragmented into increasing numbers of disciplines, a trend that still holds sway.

The word ‘ecology’ (oikos – household) first appeared in the two-volume Generelle Morphologie der Organismen ( General morphology of Organisms) published by Humboldt compatriot and admirer Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Haeckel chose this as a name for Humboldt’s special method of studying nature as the relationship between organisms and their environments. Historian Andrea Wulf points out that Haeckel was Darwin’s most ardent supporter in Germany, Haeckel’s books on evolutionary theory selling more than On the Origin . . . itself. Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie (1866) not only outlined Darwinian theory, but first names Humboldt’s mode of investigation Oecologie (ecology).^[10]

Subduing nature

Aristotle (Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8), uncharacteristically, had declared that ‘nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man’. The value of non-human things in nature was therefore merely instrumental. This was an attitude espoused by the Bible and a dictum repeated, almost verbatim, by Linnaeus in 1749 as ‘all things are made for the sake of man’. Francis Bacon wrote that ‘the world is made for man’ and Descartes declared that animals were inferior to humans who were ‘the lords and possessors of nature’. From the 18th and into the 19th centuries it was firmly believed that nature, and people, were improved by plant cultivation.^[12] Humans thus enhanced wild nature by making the world more inhabitable for themselves. Supporters of this view included the influential Comte de Buffon who favoured subduing the wilderness as a victory of civilized man over uncivilized nature. It was ‘cultivated nature’ that was ‘beautiful’.^[12]

Alexander von Humboldt added a voice of caution to this anthropocentrism, making an early stand for environmental ethics by stating that ‘Man can only act upon nature, and appropriate her forces to his use, by comprehending her laws’.^[13]

Views of nature

His own favourite work and that of his readers was Views of nature. Here he explored our human connection to nature to the full, bringing the reader into the clutches of nature through his evocative prose: exploring the way nature can influence our feelings and expressing ideas reminiscent of the biophilia proposed by contemporary biologist Ed Wilson.

For most people in Humboldt’s day, as indeed today, nature was a manifestation of the wondrous power of a creator. Von Humboldt found no need for a creator, and was comfortable with the idea of nature creating itself – an idea reinforced by Darwin who, on the day of Humboldt’s death, published his compelling account of the way the entire community of life arose from a common ancestor without the necessity for divine intervention.

Scientists of the 18th century assumed it possible to see the world in a totally detached way, taking a god’s-eye view of the natural world untainted by human affects. Subsequent science has demonstrated otherwise – that we cannot extricate ourselves from our human point of view. Humboldt’s compatriot and contemporary, Immanuel Kant, had provided compelling arguments for the existence of ‘predispositions of the mind’ that bear strongly on our understanding of ‘reality’. The sciences of the mind that have subsequently emerged have vindicated this general thesis while the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics established the crucial significance of the observer in experimental observation. The operations of the mind have moved out of metaphysics and into science.

Influence

Von Humboldt was a sensation in his day, the list of admirers being a long one. At the head of this list was Charles Darwin who idolized Humboldt, describing him as the ’greatest scientific traveler who ever lived’ and, with Humboldt’s works beside his hammock on the Beagle he declared that ’He (von Humboldt) illuminates everything I behold’, acknowledging that without Humboldt’s influence he would not have stepped on the Beagle or conceived of ‘The Origin of Species . . .. In his autobiography, Darwin recalled, reading ‘with care and profound interest Humboldt’s Personal Narrative’ which stirred in him ‘a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science’.^[2]

Other English acolytes included Joseph Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, and the Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. In Australia, Ferdinand Mueller was a fervent admirer and, in America, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Muir in North America to which can be added Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe. Later, environmentalists from George Perkins Marsh to John Muir saw Humboldt as their spiritual ancestor.

In South America the liberator Simón Bolívar, who freed South America of Spanish rule, had met Humboldt in Paris, claiming that the German’s vision had awakened the South American people to pride in their continent and that Humboldt was the ’discoverer of the New World’.^[3]

The list is endless.