The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  A view of London and the Thames (Illustration Credit 1.2)

  In London, Humboldt was introduced to botanists, explorers, artists and thinkers. He met Captain William Bligh (of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty), and Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on his first voyage around the world, and by now the president of the Royal Society, the most important scientific forum in Britain. Humboldt admired the beguiling paintings and sketches that William Hodges, the artist who had joined Cook’s second voyage, had brought back. Wherever Humboldt turned, new worlds were conjured up. Even in the early mornings, the first things he saw when he opened his eyes were the framed engravings of the East India Company ships that decorated the bedroom walls in his lodgings. Humboldt often wept when he saw these painful reminders of his unfulfilled dreams. ‘There is a drive in me,’ he wrote, ‘that often makes me feel as if I’m losing my mind.’

  When the sadness became unbearable, he went on long solitary walks. On one such excursion through the countryside in Hampstead just north of London, he saw a recruiting notice nailed to a tree, calling for young sailors. For a brief moment he thought he had found an answer to his wishes but then he remembered his strict mother. Humboldt felt an inexplicable pull towards the unknown, what the Germans call Fernweh – a longing for distant places – but he was ‘too good a son’, he conceded, to turn against her.

  He was slowly going crazy, he believed, and began to write ‘mad letters’ to his friends back home. ‘My unhappy circumstances,’ Humboldt wrote to one friend on the eve of his departure from England, ‘force me to want what I can’t have, and to do what I don’t like.’ But he still didn’t dare to challenge his mother’s expectations of what an upbringing in the Prussian elite entailed.

  Back home Humboldt’s misery became a frantic energy. He was impelled by a ‘perpetual drive’, he wrote, as if chased by ’10,000 pigs’. He darted back and forth, jumping from one subject to another. No longer did he feel insecure about his intellectual abilities or think himself lagging behind his older brother. He was proving to himself, his friends and family just how clever he was. Forster was convinced that Humboldt’s ‘brain has been sadly overworked’ – and he was not the only one. Even Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fiancée, Caroline von Dachröden, who had only met Alexander recently, was concerned. She liked Alexander, but she feared that he was going to ‘snap’. Many who knew him often remarked on this restless activity and how fast he spoke – at ‘race-horse speed’.

  Then, in the late summer of 1790, Humboldt began to study finance and economics at the academy of trade in Hamburg. He hated it for it was all numbers and account books. In his spare time, Humboldt delved into scientific treatises and travel books, he learned Danish and Swedish – anything was better than his business studies. Whenever he could, he walked down to the River Elbe in Hamburg where he watched the large merchant vessels that brought tobacco, rice and indigo from the United States. The ‘sight of the ships in the harbour’, he told a friend, was what held him together – a symbol of his hopes and dreams. He couldn’t wait to be finally the ‘master of his own luck’.

  By the time he finished his studies in Hamburg, Humboldt was twenty-one. Once again accommodating his mother’s wishes, he enrolled in June 1791 at the prestigious mining academy in Freiberg, a small town near Dresden. It was a compromise that would prepare him for a career in the Prussian Ministry of Mines – to appease his mother – but at least allowed him to indulge his interest in science and geology. The academy was the first of its kind, teaching the latest geological theories in the context of their practical application for mining. It was also home to a thriving scientific community, having attracted some of the best students and professors from across Europe.

  Within eight months Humboldt had completed a study programme that took others three years. Every morning he rose before sunrise and drove to one of the mines around Freiberg. He spent the next five hours deep in the shafts, investigating the construction of the mines, the working methods and the rocks. It helped that he was so lithe and wiry, moving easily through the narrow tunnels and low caves as he drilled and chiselled to take samples back home. He worked so ferociously that he often didn’t notice the cold or damp. By noon he crawled out of the darkness, dusted himself clean and rushed back to the academy for seminars and lectures on minerals and geology. In the evenings, and often until deep into the night, Humboldt sat at his desk, hunched over his books by candlelight, reading and studying. During his free time, he investigated the influence of light (or its lack) on plants and collected thousands of botanical specimens. He measured, noted and classified. He was a child of the Enlightenment.

  Only a few weeks after he had arrived in Freiberg, he had to ride to Erfurt, some 100 miles to the west, to attend his brother’s wedding to Caroline. But as so often, Humboldt combined social events or family celebrations with work. Instead of simply joining the festivities in Erfurt, he turned it into a 600-mile geological expedition through the region of Thuringia. Caroline was half amused and half concerned about her frenzied new brother-in-law. She enjoyed his energy but also sometimes made fun of him – as a sister might tease a younger brother. Alexander had his quirks and those should be respected, she told Wilhelm, but she was also worried about his state of mind and loneliness.

  In Freiberg, Humboldt’s only real friend was a fellow student, the son of the family from whom he had rented a room. The two young men spent day and night together, studying and talking. ‘I have never loved someone so deeply,’ Humboldt admitted, but also berated himself for forming such an intense bond because he knew that he would have to leave Freiberg after his studies and then feel even more lonely.

  The hard work at the academy, though, paid off when Humboldt finished his studies and was made a mining inspector at the astonishingly young age of twenty-two, overtaking many more senior men. Half embarrassed by his stratospheric ascent, he was also vain enough to show off to friends and family in long letters. Most importantly, the position allowed him to travel thousands of miles in order to evaluate soils, shafts and ore – from coal in Brandenburg and iron in Silesia to gold in the Fichtel Mountains and salt mines in Poland.

  During these travels, Humboldt met many people but rarely opened his heart. He was content enough, he wrote to friends, but certainly not happy. Late at night, after a full day in the mines or rattling along bad roads in his carriage, he thought of the few friends he had made over the past years. He felt ‘damned, always lonely’. As he ate another meal on his own in a squalid tavern or inn somewhere along his route, he was often too tired to write or talk. Some nights, though, he was so lonely that the need to communicate conquered his fatigue. Then he picked up his pen and composed long letters that looped and jumped, from detailed treatises about his work and scientific observations to emotional outbursts and declarations of love and friendship.

  He would give two years of his life for the memories of the time they had been together, he wrote to his friend in Freiberg, and confessed to have spent the ‘sweetest hours of his life’ with him. Written late at night, some of these letters were raw with emotion and shaped by a desperate loneliness. In page after page, Humboldt poured out his heart, and then excused his ‘foolish letters’. The next day, when work demanded his attention, all was forgotten and it would often be weeks or even months until he wrote again. Even to the few who knew him best, Humboldt often remained elusive.

  Meanwhile his career soared and his interests widened. Humboldt now also became interested in the working conditions of the miners whom he saw crawling into the bowels of the earth every morning. To improve their safety, he invented a breathing mask, as well as a lamp that would work even in the deepest oxygen-poor shafts. Shocked by the miners’ lack of knowledge, Humboldt wrote textbooks for them and founded a mining school. When he realized that historical documents might prove useful for the exploitation of disused or inefficient mines because they sometimes mentioned rich veins of ores or recorded old findings, he spent weeks deciphering sixteenth
-century manuscripts. He was working and travelling at such a manic pace that some of his colleagues thought he must have ‘8 legs and 4 arms’.

  The intensity of it all made him ill, as he was still battling with recurring fevers and nervous disorders. The reasons, he thought, were probably a combination of being overworked and spending too much time in freezing conditions deep in the mines. But despite illness and his packed work schedule, Humboldt still managed to publish his first books, a specialized treatise on the basalts to be found along the River Rhine and another on the subterranean flora in Freiberg – strange mould and sponge-like plants that grew in intricate shapes on the damp beams in the mines. He focused on what he could measure and observe.

  During the eighteenth century ‘natural philosophy’ – what we would call ‘natural sciences’ today – evolved from being a subject within philosophy along with metaphysics, logic and moral philosophy to becoming an independent discipline that required its own approach and methodology. In tandem new natural philosophy subjects developed and emerged into distinctly separate disciplines such as botany, zoology, geology and chemistry. And though Humboldt was working across different disciplines at the same time, he still kept them separate. This growing specialization provided a tunnel vision that focused in on ever greater detail, but ignored the global view that would later become Humboldt’s hallmark.

  It was during this period that Humboldt became obsessed with so-called ‘animal electricity’, or Galvanism as it was known after Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist. Galvani had managed to make animal muscles and nerves convulse when he attached different metals to them. Galvani suspected that animal nerves contained electricity. Fascinated by the idea, Humboldt began a long series of 4,000 experiments in which he cut, prodded, poked and electrocuted frogs, lizards and mice. Not content with experimenting on animals alone, he began to use his own body too, always taking his instruments on his work travels through Prussia. In the evenings, when his official work was done, he set up his electrical apparatus in the small bedrooms he rented. Metal rods, forceps, glass plates and vials filled with all kinds of chemicals were lined up on the table, as was paper and pen. With a scalpel he made incisions on his arms and torso. Then he carefully rubbed chemicals and acids into the open wounds or stuck metals, wires and electrodes on to his skin or under his tongue. Every twitch, every convulsion, burning sensation or pain was noted meticulously. Many of his wounds became infected and some days his skin was striped with blood-filled welts. His body looked as battered as a ‘street urchin’, he admitted, but he also proudly reported that despite the great pain, it all went ‘splendidly’.

  One of the animal electricity experiments that Humboldt conducted with frog’s legs (Illustration Credit 1.3)

  Through his experiments Humboldt was engaging with one of the most hotly debated ideas in the scientific world: the concept of organic and inorganic ‘matter’ and whether either contained any kind of ‘force’ or ‘active principle’. Newton had propounded the idea that matter was essentially inert but that other properties were added by God. Meanwhile, those scientists who had been busy classifying flora and fauna had been more concerned with bringing order to chaos than with ideas that plants or animals might be governed by a different set of laws than inanimate objects.

  In the late eighteenth century, some scientists began to question this mechanical model of nature, noting its failure to explain the existence of living matter. And by the time Humboldt began to experiment with ‘animal electricity’, more and more scientists believed that matter was not lifeless but that there had to be a force that triggered this activity. All over Europe scientists began to discard Descartes’s ideas that animals were essentially machines. Physicians in France, as well as the Scottish surgeon John Hunter and in particular Humboldt’s former professor in Göttingen, the scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, all began to formulate new theories of life. When Humboldt was studying in Göttingen, Blumenbach had published a revised edition of his book Über den Bildungstrieb. In it Blumenbach presented a concept that explained that several forces existed within living organisms such as plants and animals. The most important was what he called the Bildungstrieb – the ‘formative drive’ – a force that shaped the formation of bodies. Every living organism, from humans to mould, had this formative drive, Blumenbach wrote, and it was essential for the creation of life.

  For Humboldt nothing less was at stake in his experiments than the undoing of what he called the ‘Gordian knot of the processes of life’.

  2

  Imagination and Nature

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt

  IN 1794 ALEXANDER VON Humboldt briefly interrupted his experiments and his mining inspection tours to visit his brother, Wilhelm, who now lived with his wife Caroline and their two young children in Jena, some 150 miles south-west of Berlin. Jena was a town of only 4,000 people that lay within the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, a small state that was headed by an enlightened ruler, Karl August. It was a centre of learning and literature that within a few years was to become the birthplace of German Idealism and Romanticism. The University of Jena had become one of the largest and most famous in the German-speaking regions, attracting progressive thinkers from across the other more repressive German states because of its liberal attitude. There was no other place, said the resident poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, where liberty and truth ruled so much.

  Fifteen miles from Jena was Weimar, the state’s capital, and the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet. Weimar had fewer than 1,000 houses and was said to be so small that everybody knew everybody. Cattle were driven through the cobbled streets and the post was delivered so irregularly that it was easier for Goethe to send a letter to his friend Schiller, who worked at the university in Jena, with his greengrocer on her delivery rounds rather than wait for the mail coach.

  In Jena and Weimar, one visitor said, the brightest minds came together like the sunrays in a magnifying glass. Wilhelm and Caroline had moved to Jena in spring 1794 and were part of the circle of friends around Goethe and Schiller. They lived on the market square opposite Schiller – so close that they could wave out of the window to arrange their daily meetings. When Alexander arrived, Wilhelm dispatched a quick note to Weimar, inviting Goethe to Jena. Goethe was happy to come and stayed, as always, in his guest rooms at the duke’s castle, not far away from the market square, just a couple of blocks north.

  During Humboldt’s visit, the men met every day. They made a lively group. There were noisy discussions and roaring laughter – frequently until late at night. Despite his youth, Humboldt often took the lead. He ‘forced us’ into the natural sciences, Goethe enthused, as they talked about zoology and volcanoes, as well as about botany, chemistry and Galvanism. ‘In eight days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour,’ Goethe said.

  December 1794 was bitterly cold. The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for Napoleon’s troops on their warpath through Europe. Deep snow blanketed the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. But every morning just before sunrise, Humboldt, Goethe and a few other scientific friends trudged through the darkness and snow across Jena’s market square. Wrapped up in thick woollen coats, they passed the sturdy fourteenth-century town hall on their walk to the university where they attended lectures on anatomy. It was freezing in the almost empty auditorium in the medieval round stone tower that was part of the ancient city wall – but the advantage of the unusually low temperatures was that the cadavers they dissected there remained fresh for much longer. Goethe, who hated the cold and normally would have preferred the crackling heat of his stove, could not have been happier. He couldn’t stop talking. Humboldt’s presence stimulated him.

  Then in his mid-forties, Goethe was Germany’s most celebrated literary figure. Exactly two decades previously, he had been catapulted to international fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about a forlorn lover who commits suicide, which had encapsulated the sentimental
ity of that time. It became the book of a whole generation and many identified with the eponymous protagonist. The novel was published in most European languages and became so popular that countless men, including young Karl August, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed in a Werther uniform consisting of a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat, brown boots and round felt hat. People talked of Werther fever and the Chinese even produced Werther porcelain aimed at the European market.

  When Goethe first met Humboldt, he was no longer the dazzling young poet of the Sturm und Drang, the era of ‘Storm and Stress’. This German pre-Romantic period had celebrated individuality and a full spectrum of extreme feelings – from dramatic love to deep melancholy – all filled with passion, emotions, romantic poems and novels. In 1775, when Goethe had first been invited to Weimar by the then eighteen-year-old Karl August, he had embarked on a long round of love affairs, drunkenness and pranks. Goethe and Karl August had roistered through the streets of Weimar, sometimes wrapped in white sheets to scare those who believed in ghosts. They had stolen barrels from a local merchant to roll down hills, and flirted with peasant girls – all in the name of genius and freedom. And, of course, no one could complain since Karl August, the young ruler, was involved. But those wild years were long gone, and with them the theatrical declamations of love, the tears, the smashing of glasses and naked swimming that had scandalized the locals. In 1788, six years before Humboldt’s first visit, Goethe had shocked Weimar society one more time when he had taken the uneducated Christiane Vulpius as his lover. Christiane, who worked as a seamstress in Weimar, gave birth to their son August less than two years later. Ignoring convention and malicious gossip, Christiane and August lived with Goethe.