The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Marsh believed that the lessons were buried in the scars that the human species had left on the landscape for thousands of years. ‘The future,’ he said, ‘is more uncertain than the past.’ By looking back, Marsh was looking forward.

  1 The seven slave states that first seceded were: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. By May 1861 four more had followed: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

  2 Humboldt had already seen these dangers and warned that the scheme to irrigate the Llanos in Venezuela by canal from Lake Valencia would be irresponsible. In the short term it would create fertile fields in the Llanos, but the long-term effect could only be an ‘arid desert’. It would leave the Aragua Valley as barren as the deforested surrounding mountains.

  3 Everyone who was twenty-one and older and who had not fought against the United States could apply. The requirement was to live on the land for at least five years and to ‘improve’ it.

  4 Bolívar made the removal of any tree or timber from state-owned forests a punishable offence. He also worried about the possible extinction of the wild herds of vicuñas.

  5 Marsh donated the copyright of Man and Nature to a charity that helped wounded Civil War soldiers. Luckily for Marsh, his brother and nephew quickly bought the copyright back before the sales picked up.

  22

  Art, Ecology and Nature

  Ernst Haeckel and Humboldt

  THE DAY HE heard about Alexander von Humboldt’s death, twenty-five-year-old German zoologist Ernst Haeckel felt miserable. ‘Two souls, alas, live in my chest,’ Haeckel wrote to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, using a well-known image from Goethe’s Faust to explain his feelings. Where Faust is torn between his love for the earthly world and the longing to soar to higher realms, Haeckel was torn between art and science, between feeling nature with his heart or investigating the natural world like a zoologist. The news that Humboldt was dead – the man whose books had inspired Haeckel’s love for nature, science, explorations and painting since early childhood – had triggered this crisis.

  At the time Haeckel was in Naples in Italy where he hoped to make some zoological discoveries that would kick-start his academic career in Germany. So far the scientific part of the trip had turned out to be completely unsuccessful. He had come to study the anatomy of sea urchins, sea-cucumbers and starfish but it had been impossible to find enough living specimens in the Gulf of Naples. Instead of a rich sea harvest, it was the Italian landscape that offered what he called ‘beckoning temptations’. How was he supposed to be a scientist in a discipline that felt claustrophobically cramped when nature laid out its tantalizing wares as if in an oriental bazaar? It was so bad, Haeckel wrote to Anna, that he could hear ‘Mephistopheles’ scornful laughter’.

  In this one letter, Haeckel filtered his doubts through the lens of Humboldt’s vision of nature. How was he to reconcile taking the detailed observations that his scientific work required with his urge to ‘understand nature as a whole’? How was he to align his artistic appreciation for nature with scientific truth? In Cosmos Humboldt had written about the bond that united knowledge, science, poetry and artistic feeling, but Haeckel was unsure how to apply this to his zoological work. Flora and fauna invited him to unlock their secrets, teasing and luring him, but he didn’t know if he should use a paintbrush or a microscope. How could he be sure?

  Humboldt’s death set in motion a phase of uncertainty in Haeckel’s life during which he searched for his true vocation. It marked the beginning of a career that was shaped partly by anger, crisis and grief. Death would become a channelling force in Haeckel’s life – but instead of leading towards stasis or stagnation, it made him work harder, more ferociously and with no concern for his future reputation. It also made Haeckel one of the most controversial and remarkable scientists of his time1 – a man who influenced artists and scientists alike, and one who moved Humboldt’s concept of nature into the twentieth century.

  Humboldt had always loomed large in Haeckel’s life. Born in Potsdam in 1834 – the same year that Humboldt had begun Cosmos – Haeckel had read his books as a boy. His father worked for the Prussian government but was also interested in science and the Haeckel family spent many evenings reading scientific publications aloud to each other. Though he had never met Humboldt, Haeckel had been immersed in his ideas of nature from childhood. He so adored Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics that he too dreamed of being an explorer, but Haeckel’s father had envisaged a more traditional career for him.

  Following his father’s wishes, the eighteen-year-old had therefore enrolled in 1852 at the medical school in Würzburg in Bavaria to become a doctor. Haeckel was homesick and lonely in Würzburg. After long days at school, he withdrew to his room, desperate to read Cosmos. Every evening when he opened the well-thumbed pages, Haeckel disappeared into Humboldt’s glorious world. When not reading, he hiked through the forests, seeking solitude and a connection to the natural world. Tall, slender, handsome and with piercing blue eyes, Haeckel ran and swam every day and was as athletic as Humboldt had been as a young man.

  ‘I cannot tell you how much joy the pleasure of nature gives me,’ Haeckel wrote to his parents from Würzburg; ‘all my worries disappear at once.’ He wrote of the gentle song of birds and of the wind combing through the leaves. He admired double rainbows and mountain slopes dappled in the fleeting shadows of the clouds. Sometimes Haeckel returned from his long walks loaded with ivy with which he made wreaths that he hung across Humboldt’s portrait in his room. How he longed to live in Berlin, closer to his hero. He wanted to attend the annual dinner at the Geographical Society in Berlin where Humboldt would be, he wrote to his parents in May 1853, a few months after his arrival in Würzburg. Seeing Humboldt – even from a distance – was his ‘most ardent desire’.

  The following spring Haeckel was allowed to study for a term in Berlin – and although he failed to glimpse Humboldt, he did find someone else to admire. Haeckel took some classes on comparative anatomy with the most famous German zoologist of the time, Johannes Müller, who was working on fish and marine invertebrates. Enthralled by Müller’s lively stories of seashore collecting, Haeckel spent a summer in Heligoland, a small island off the coast of Germany in the North Sea. He spent his days outside, swimming and catching sea creatures. Haeckel admired the jellyfish they caught – their transparent bodies were veined with streaks of colour and their long tentacles moved elegantly through the water. When he netted a particularly magnificent one, Haeckel had found his favourite animal and a scientific discipline to pursue: zoology.

  Ernst Haeckel with his fishing equipment (Illustration Credit 22.1)

  Though Haeckel obeyed his father’s wishes and continued his medical studies, he never intended to practise as a doctor. He enjoyed botany and comparative anatomy, marine invertebrates and microscopes, mountain climbing and swimming, painting and drawing, but loathed medicine. His appetite for Humboldt’s work increased the more he read. When he visited his parents, he took Views of Nature with him and asked his mother to buy him a copy of Personal Narrative because, he said, he was ‘obsessed’ with it. From the university’s library in Würzburg he borrowed dozens of Humboldt’s books, ranging from the botanical volumes to the large folio edition of Vues des Cordillères with its spectacular engravings of Latin American landscapes and monuments – ‘preciously sumptuous editions’, as he called them. He also asked his parents to send him as a Christmas present the atlas that had been published to accompany Cosmos. It was easier for him, he explained, to understand and memorize through images rather than words.

  During a visit to Berlin, Haeckel made a pilgrimage to the Humboldt family estate, Tegel. It was a glorious summer’s day even if Humboldt was nowhere to be seen. Haeckel bathed in the lake where his hero had once swum and sat at the water’s edge until the moon cast a silver veil across the surface. This was the closest he had ever come to Humboldt.

  He wanted to follow Humboldt’s footsteps and
see South America. This would be the only way to reconcile the two conflicting souls in his chest: the ‘man of reason’ and the artist ruled by ‘feeling and poetry’. The only profession that combined science with emotions and adventure was that of an explorer-naturalist, Haeckel was certain. He dreamed ‘day and night’ of a great voyage and began to make plans. First he would take his medical degree and then find a position as a ship’s surgeon. Once he had reached the tropics, he would leave the ship and begin his ‘Robinsonian project’. The advantage of this scheme was, Haeckel told his increasingly worried parents, that it would force him to finish his studies in Würzburg. He would do anything as long as it meant going ‘far, far into the world’.

  Haeckel’s parents, though, had different ideas and insisted that their son work as a doctor in Berlin. Initially Haeckel did as he was asked, but quietly tried to sabotage their plans. When he set up his practice in Berlin, he introduced rather eccentric opening hours. Patients could only see him for consultations between five and six o’clock in the morning. Unsurprisingly, he had just half a dozen patients during his year as a doctor – although, as he proudly announced, none died in his care.

  In the end it was Haeckel’s love for his fiancée Anna that made him consider a more conventional career. Haeckel called her his ‘truly German forest child’. Instead of material things – clothes, furniture or fine jewellery – Anna enjoyed the simple joys of life such as a walk in the countryside or lying in a meadow among wildflowers. She was, as Haeckel said, ‘completely unspoiled and pure’. Serendipity had it that she shared her birthday with Humboldt – 14 September – which was also the date that the couple announced their engagement. Haeckel decided to become a zoology professor. It was a respectable profession, and he wouldn’t have to deal with his ‘insurmountable revulsion’ at the ‘diseased body’. To make his mark in the scientific world, he simply needed to decide on a research project.

  Early in February 1859 Haeckel arrived in Italy where he hoped to find new marine invertebrates. Anything would do, from jellyfish to tiny single-celled organisms, as long as a discovery launched his new career. After some weeks of sightseeing in Florence and Rome, Haeckel travelled to Naples to start working in earnest but nothing went to plan. The fishermen refused to assist him. The city was dirty and noisy. The streets were full of crooks and swindlers – and he was paying inflated prices for everything. It was hot and dusty. There were not enough sea urchins and jellyfish.

  It was in Naples that Haeckel received the letter in which his father reported the news of Humboldt’s death and which made him think not only about art and science, but also about his own future. In the noisy narrow Neapolitan streets that snaked like a labyrinth below the imposing shape of Vesuvius, Haeckel once again felt the battle of the two souls in his chest. On 17 June, three weeks after he heard about his hero’s death, Haeckel couldn’t face Naples any more. Instead, he went to Ischia, a small island just a short boat ride away in the Gulf of Naples.

  On Ischia Haeckel became acquainted with a German poet and painter, Hermann Allmers. For a week the two men wandered across the island, sketching, hiking, swimming and talking. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that they decided to travel together for a while. When they returned to Naples, they climbed Vesuvius and then sailed to Capri, another small island in the Bay of Naples where Haeckel hoped to see nature as an ‘interconnected whole’.

  Haeckel packed an easel and watercolours and for good measure also his instruments and notebooks, but within a week of arriving in Capri he had embraced a new bohemian lifestyle. He was living his dreams, he admitted to Anna who was patiently waiting for her fiancé in Berlin. The microscope stayed in its box. Instead Haeckel was painting. He didn’t want to be a ‘microscoping worm’, he told Anna – how could he when nature in all its glory was calling him: ‘Outside! Outside!’ Only an ‘ossified scholar’ would be able to resist. Ever since Haeckel had read Humboldt’s Views of Nature as a boy, he had dreamed of this kind of ‘half wild life in nature’. Here on Capri, he was finally seeing the ‘delightful glory of the macro-cosmos’, he wrote to Anna. All he needed was a ‘faithful paintbrush’. He wanted to dedicate his life to this poetic world of light and colours. The crisis that Humboldt’s death had triggered was turning into a fully-fledged transformation.

  His parents received similar letters, although with less emphasis on the wild aspects of his new life. Instead Haeckel told them about his possible future as an artist. He reminded them that Humboldt had written about the bond between art and science. With his artistic talent – to which, he assured his parents, other painters in Capri attested – and his botanical knowledge he believed that he was in a unique position to take up the gauntlet that Humboldt had thrown down. After all, landscape painting had been one of ‘Humboldt’s favourite interests’. Haeckel now announced that he wanted to be a painter who ‘strode with his paintbrush through all zones from the Arctic Ocean to the Equator’.

  Back in Berlin, Haeckel’s father was not too pleased about these developments and dispatched a stern letter. For years he had watched his son’s fluctuating plans. He was not a rich man, he now reminded Haeckel, and ‘can’t have you travelling all over the world for years’. Why did his son always have to take everything to extremes – working, swimming, climbing, but also dreaming, hoping and doubting? ‘You must now cultivate your real job,’ Haeckel senior continued, not leaving any doubt where he saw his son’s future.

  It was again Haeckel’s love for Anna that made him realize that his dream would have to remain a dream. In order to marry her, he would become a ‘tame’ professor instead of exploring the world with a paintbrush. In mid-September, a little more than four months after Humboldt’s death, Haeckel packed his bags and instruments to travel to Messina in Sicily to concentrate on his scientific work – but the weeks in Capri had changed him for ever. When the Sicilian fishermen brought buckets filled with seawater and alive with thousands of minute organisms, Haeckel saw them as a zoologist and as an artist. As he carefully placed drops of water under his microscope, new marvels revealed themselves. These tiny marine invertebrates looked like ‘delicate works of art’, he thought, made of colourful cut glass or gems. Instead of dreading the days behind the microscope, he was gripped by these ‘sea wonders’.

  Every day he swam at dawn, when the sun lacquered the water surface red and nature glowed in its ‘most exquisite brilliance’, he wrote home. After the swim, he went to the fish market to pick up his daily seawater delivery but by 8 a.m. he was in his room where he worked until 5 p.m. After a quick meal followed by a brisk walk along the beach, he was back at his desk at 7.30 p.m. writing notes until midnight. The hard work paid off. By December, three months after his arrival in Sicily, Haeckel was certain that he had found the scientific project that would make his career: they were called radiolarians.

  These minuscule single-celled marine organisms were about 1/1,000 of an inch and visible only under the microscope. Once magnified, the radiolarians revealed their stunning structure. Their exquisite mineral skeletons exhibited a complex pattern of symmetry, often with ray-like projections that gave them a floating appearance. Week after week, Haeckel identified new species and even new families. By early February he had discovered over sixty previously unknown species. Then, on 10 February 1860, the morning catch alone brought twelve new ones. He fell on his knees in front of his microscope, he wrote to Anna, and bowed to the benevolent sea gods and nymphs to thank them for their generous gifts.

  This work was ‘made for me’, Haeckel now declared. It brought together his love for physical exercise, nature, science and art – from the joy of the early morning catch which he was now doing himself to the last pencil stroke of his drawings. The radiolarian revealed a new world to Haeckel, a world of order but also wonder – so ‘poetic and delightful’, he told Anna. By the end of March 1860, he had discovered more than one hundred new species and was ready to go home to work them up into a book.

  Haeckel il
lustrated his zoological work with his own drawings of perfect scientific accuracy but also of remarkable beauty. It helped that he could look with one eye into his microscope while the other focused on his drawing board – a talent so unusual that his former professors said they had never seen someone capable of it. For Haeckel the act of drawing was the best method of understanding nature. With pencil and paintbrush, he said, he ‘penetrated deeper into the secret of her beauty’ than ever before; they were his tools of seeing and learning. The two souls in his breast had finally been united.

  The radiolarians were so beautiful, Haeckel wrote to his old travel companion Allmers on his return to Germany, that he wondered if Allmers wanted to use them to decorate his studio – or even ‘create a new “style”!!’.2 He worked frantically on his drawings, and two years later, in 1862, he published a magnificent two-volume book: Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda Radiaria). As a result he was made an associate professor at the University of Jena, the small town where Humboldt had met Goethe more than half a century previously. In August 1862 Haeckel married Anna. He was blissfully happy. Without her, he said, he would have died like a plant without ‘life-giving sunlight’.

  While Haeckel worked on Die Radiolarien, he had read a book that would change his life yet again: Darwin’s Origin of Species. Haeckel was struck by Darwin’s theory on evolution – it was ‘a completely crazy book’, he later recounted. In one great sweep the Origin of Species gave Haeckel the answers to how organisms had developed. Darwin’s book, Haeckel said, did ‘open a new world’. It provided a solution ‘to all problems, however knotty’, Haeckel wrote in a long and admiring letter to Darwin. With Origin of Species, Darwin replaced the belief of God’s divine creation of animals, plants and humans with the concept that they were products of natural processes – a revolutionary idea that shook religious doctrine to its core.