Epilogue: Humboldt’s Spirit
AS word of Humboldt’s death filtered around the world, there was an outpouring of sadness and reverence befitting a beloved international celebrity. All the New York papers, like those around the globe, carried the story on their front pages. The Herald lauded him as “one of the greatest men of his age or of any other age” and suggested, “Perhaps there is not in the annals of mankind the name of another man who had lived to the same age and produced such an amount of intellectual work, and that, too, of the highest order. . . . He had a gigantic intellect, from which nothing in nature or in science appeared to be hid. He could grasp all subjects, and he appeared to know everything. . . . Cosmos is his imperishable monument, which will endure as long as the earth which it describes.”
The Tribune averred, “His fame belonged not only to Europe, but to the world; and in this country especially, probably no man who was known to us only through the medium of his scientific writings was held in equal reverence and admiration. . . . But what will ever distinguish Humboldt from the mass of physical inquirers who had preceded him, is his study of the universe as a harmonious whole, and his search for the laws of order, beauty, and majesty beneath the apparent confusion and contradictions of isolated appearances.” The Evening Post called him simply “The most eminent scientific man of the nineteenth century” and added, “Nature was to him a marvelous whole, all the parts of which were intimately connected with each other, and conspired to one grand and harmonious result.” In addition, the articles lauded him for his practicality, demonstrated friendship for America, generosity, unwavering belief in progress, unstinting work ethic, and unaffected manners.
Ten years later, on the centennial of his birth, Humboldt’s memory was still very much alive. In New York, where he had never even set foot, the Times’ headline proclaimed, CELEBRATION GENERALLY THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY. The city “seemed to be in holiday dress,” a proclamation was presented by the mayor, a bronze bust was unveiled in Central Park to the cheers of “an immense throng” of at least twenty-five thousand (“two thirds of whom were Germans”), and a banner proclaiming, “1769—HUMBOLDT—1869,” was unfurled over City Hall. There was “an imposing” parade through streets hung with American and German flags, an even bigger torchlight procession that evening, and a grand banquet for 250 invited guests.
In Boston, three different events were held, including an organ concert and a two-hour eulogy by Louis Agassiz at the Music Hall, sponsored by the Society of Natural History and attended by such luminaries as Governor Claflin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the evening the city government sponsored a reception at Horticultural Hall, where Julia Ward Howe and Oliver Wendell Holmes recited poems written for the occasion and where a letter from the Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier was also read. Other cities across the country had their own Humboldt celebrations, including Washington, Cleveland, Richmond, Chicago, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Baltimore, among many others. In Germany, the day, predictably, was marked by “a national demonstration” and, in Berlin, the laying of the cornerstone for a Humboldt monument.
We may well ask, If Humboldt was so widely celebrated and so beloved during his long life and even a decade afterward, why has he been largely forgotten in our own time (with the exception of university-level geography textbooks)? One factor is actually the same one that made him great—the wide-ranging nature of his intellect. Though Humboldt was a tireless innovator in the sciences, by the end of his long life, he’d become an anachronism. Above all he was a generalist, intent on examining every natural process and shaping the myriad discordant data into a coherent whole, as in Cosmos. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, science was progressing so rapidly that it was increasingly becoming the province of specialists, as shown by the trend to replace university departments of “Natural Philosophy” with the narrower disciplines that we know today. Science was also becoming the province of mathematics, and though Humboldt was a great advocate of careful quantification, the integration of data into mathematical formulas was never his forte. (For instance, after discovering how the earth’s magnetic field varies with latitude, he had left it to his friend Carl Gauss to work out the formulas predicting the values for any point on earth.) Ironically, the generalizing worldview that Humboldt championed, which in an earlier time had made him the most celebrated naturalist in the world, increasingly seemed static, soon to be overshadowed by the more dynamic model proposed in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in the year of Humboldt’s death.
Then, too, Humboldt never made a single great, paradigm-changing discovery with which his name would be forever linked, as Darwin had with natural selection. Many of Humboldt’s discoveries were so fundamental that they came to be taken for granted, and their source was eventually forgotten. His strength lay rather in opening avenues of research that could then be developed by others. In fact, Humboldt was so successful in cultivating a new generation of scientists that they soon outstripped him, though none would approach him in sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise. As a result Humboldt assumed, in the words of a biographer, “the anonymity of a great teacher,” remembered with gratitude by his students but remaining in the background.
Changes in America itself also contributed to Humboldt’s eclipse. As German immigrants became assimilated into the larger society, their heroes tended to be those who made their mark in North America, not in the hemispheres to the south or east. And as the tremendous national dramas of civil war and westward expansion played themselves out, the United States produced no dearth of homegrown heroes. With the country’s attention shifting inward, Humboldt, though memorialized in numerous place names around the globe, including the Humboldt Current, was gradually nudged aside.
Owing to accident of birth, personal inclination, and sheer longevity, Humboldt had either the good fortune or the bad luck to inhabit the cusp between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Period. Instead of standing firmly for either Old or New, he straddled both camps, melding a cool rationalism with emotional warmth and aesthetic awareness. Similarly, he combined a passion for scientific generalization with a compulsion for quantification, and he even abetted early efforts at scientific specialization that would soon make his sweeping physique générale seem outmoded. Is it possible that this very individuality, this defiance of easy classification, is yet another reason for the gradual fading of his memory? In any event, there is no doubt that by nurturing talented newcomers with perspectives different from his own, Humboldt helped to usher in the era in which he himself seemed out of place.
Still, Humboldt was one of the creators of this modern world that we take for granted. Making the first in-depth scientific expedition through the Amazon Basin and the Andes, he opened up an entire continent to scientific and geographic study, redrawing maps, discovering thousands of new species, and canvassing South America so thoroughly that his contemporaries complained that he had left nothing for them. His studies of New World volcanoes reshaped geology by helping to replace Werner’s neptunist paradigm, first with Hutton’s vulcanist model and then with Lyell’s synthesis of the two competing camps. He also greatly increased our understanding of volcanic processes, including the discovery that volcanoes tend to be found along fissures in the earth’s crust.
He created the science of plant geography, and his painstaking data collection laid the basis of modern physical and political geography, oceanography, and climatology. Besides confirming that the earth’s magnetic field varies predictably with latitude and discovering the planet’s magnetic equator, he was the first to observe magnetic storms. He was instrumental in focusing scientists’ attention on the need for accurate, systematic data collection, and he created such fundamental techniques of data presentation as isotherms and geological profiles. He was an unstinting supporter of scientific talent and an important early advocate of international scientific collaboration. A lifelong liberal and humanist, he pion
eered the study of indigenous American cultures, including the Inca and the Aztecs, and he did everything in his power to bring science within the grasp of the layperson.
Humboldt was a firm believer in the leveling power of science, its ability to improve the life of every member of society regardless of social class. One could argue that in our own times science has been used to advance totalitarian causes as often as democratic ones. However, Humboldt would respond that “scientific literacy” (as we now call it) is more crucial than ever in today’s technologically driven republics, where citizens are expected to cast informed ballots on such issues as cloning, global warming, and environmental conservation. In any event, Humboldt’s creed has been proven beyond all doubt—science has improved the lot of mankind, spectacularly if not evenhandedly, despite the problems of technological growth. And Humboldt himself played a key role in that process.
Late in life, Humboldt summed up his own contribution with typical understatement: “I have never been able to hoodwink myself as I have always been surrounded by people who were superior to me. My life has been useful to science less through the little I have contributed myself than through my efforts to let others profit of the advantages of my position. I have always had a just appreciation of the merits of others, I have even shown some acumen in the discovery of new talent. I like to think that, while I was at fault to tackle from intellectual curiosity too great a variety of scientific interests, I have left on my route some trace of my passing.”
By opening up a new continent to scientific inquiry, by laying the foundation of so many branches of modern science, by revolutionizing research methods through careful observation and measurement in the field—and especially by urging the scientific enterprise toward the search for unifying principles—Alexander von Humboldt played a crucial part in creating science as we know it today. Inheriting the broad scientific vision of those who had gone before, such as Thales and Newton, he bequeathed that philosophy to those who would come later, such as Darwin and Hubble. Today, as science continues to strive for the Big Picture with such all-encompassing theories as chaos and super-strings, Humboldt’s quest to grasp the unity of nature, far from being a dusty anachronism, is as vital as ever. For throughout history, the synthesizing impulse has proved a powerful, even world-changing, tool for understanding the universe, capable of penetrating the intricate, contradictory web of surface phenomena to reveal the universal, unified cosmos beneath—that fundamental, unchanging phenomenon we call truth.
Bibliography
HUMBOLDT’S WORKS
THROUGHOUT this book, I have quoted and paraphrased liberally from Humboldt’s own works, especially the following. For additional Humboldt publications, see Appendix I.
Humboldt, Alexander von. Aspects of Nature in Different Lands and Climates; with Scientific Elucidations. Translated by Mrs. Sabine. Philadelphia: Lean and Blanchard, 1850.
———. Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. Translated by E. C. Otté. Introduction by Nicolas A. Rupke. Volumes 1 and 2. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
———. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Translated by John Black. Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Maples Dunn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
———, and Aimé Bonpland. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America During the Years 1799-1804. [Includes Political Essay on the Island of Cuba.] Translated by Thomasina Ross. Volumes 1-3. London: George Routledge and Sons, Limited, 1895.
———. Researches, Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, with Descriptions & Views of Some of the Most Striking Scenes of the Cordilleras. Translated by Helen Maria Williams. Volumes 1 and 2. London: Longman, 1814.
HUMBOLDT BIOGRAPHIES
After the works of Humboldt himself, I have drawn most heavily from the following biographies. While I have differed with these authors at points, their work has been invaluable:
Botting, Douglas. Humboldt and the Cosmos. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973.
De Terre, Helmut. Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.
Kellner, L. Alexander von Humboldt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
OTHER SOURCES
Anna, Timothy A. The Fall of The Royal Government in Mexico City. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Bernier, Olivier. The World in 1800. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers. New York: Random House, 1983.
Collier, Richard. The River That God Forgot: The Story of the Amazon Rubber Boom. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968.
Collier, Simon, Harold Blakemore, and Thomas E. Skidmore, general editors. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Cvancara, Alan M. A Field Manual for the Amateur Geologist. Revised Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.
———. The Voyage of the Beagle. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Díaz, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Translated and with an Introduction by J. M. Cohen. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1963.
Eliot, Charles William. Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern. The Harvard Classics, Volume XXXIII. New York: P. F. Collier & Sons, 1909-14.
Fagg, John Edwin. Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965.
Faul, Henry, and Carol Faul. It Began with a Stone: A History of Geology from the Stone Age to the Age of Plate Tectonics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1983.
Fison-Roche, Roger. A History of Mountain Climbing. Paris, New York: Flammarion, 1996.
Furneaux, Robin. The Amazon: The Story of a Great River. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.
Gould, Stephen Jay. I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. New York: Harmony Books, 2002.
Greene, Mott T. Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970.
Herndon, William Lewis. Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
Jones, Steve. Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated. New York: Random house, 2000.
Keay, John, general editor. History of World Exploration. London: Paul Hamlyn Publishing, 1991.
Kendall, Ann. Everyday Life of the Incas. New York: Dorset Press, 1973.
Laudan, Rachel. From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lewis, William. Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon. Edited and with an Introduction by Hamilton Basso. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1952.
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. Volumes 1-3. London: John Murray, 1830-33.
Mason, Stephen F. A History of the Sciences. New Revised Edition. New York: Macmillan General Reference, 1962.
Prescott, William H. The Conquest of Mexico. New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1948.
———. The Conquest of Peru. New York: The Heritage Press, 1957.
Radin, Paul. Indians of South America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1942.
Revkin, Andrew. The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.
Roosevelt, Theodore. Through the Brazilian Wilderness. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1914.
Schurz, William Lytle. This New World. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1954.
Simons, Geoff. Cuba: From Conquistador to Castro. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Smith, Anthony. Explorers of the Amazon. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1990.
Sobel, Dava. Longitude: T
he True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker & Co., 1995.
Soustille, Jacques. The Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of Spanish Conquest. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.
Sterling, Tom. The Amazon. Time-Life Books, 1975.
Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Vega, Garcilaso de la. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.
Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Wilson, Jason. Introduction to abridged edition of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Worcester, Donald E. Simón Bolívar. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.
Sources
PRINCIPAL sources are given below; other resources may have been consulted for each chapter as well. See Bibliography for complete bibliographic information on each title. Sources under each subheading are listed in order of importance to my research.
All Humboldt quotations and details of his journey are taken from his Personal Narrative, except as noted below.
PREFACE: Humboldt’s Ghost
Humboldt quotation regarding la physique générale: J. Wilson
Goethe quotation: De Terre
Emerson quotation: De Terre
Bolívar quotation: Wendy Moonan, “Jungle Fever Strikes a Collector,” New York Times, March 30, 2001
Gould quotation: Gould
Tribune quotation: Issue of May 19, 1859
Herald quotation: Issue of May 19, 1859
Jones quotation: Jones
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