The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Humboldt arrived back in Paris to find himself famous. It wasn’t altogether a surprise: He had shrewd marketing instincts. He had sent back many of his most exciting samples well in advance. He had also written letters to friends that began “By the time you receive this I will probably be dead …”—all of which helped to create a sense of anticipation.

  As Bonpland embarked on cataloging the contents of the teetering stacks of sample cases, Humboldt set out to turn his notes and sketches into a book. His initial estimate of two years’ work proved hopelessly optimistic. The thirty volumes of Personal Narrative: A Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of a New Continent 1799–1804 took him almost thirty years (and almost all of his money) to complete. It is one of the great milestones of scientific literature and one of the very few that reads with the mounting excitement of an adventure story.

  One of the reasons the book took so long to finish is that Humboldt had so much else to do. Over the next three decades, he climbed Vesuvius three times, went under the Thames in the diving bell used by Isambard Kingdom Brunel during the construction of the Thames Tunnel, and led a six-month expedition across Russia to the Chinese border. This didn’t quite match the South American journey for new discoveries or excitement, but it did lead to the establishment of a network of meteorological stations that stretched first across Russia and then around the world. The data they collected transformed our understanding of the weather and the operation of the earth’s magnetic field. The 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica described it as “the first truly international scientific collaboration.”

  Little is known of Humboldt the private man. The mask of the suave diplomat rarely slipped, although his close friend and fellow scientist François Arago hinted at a more unbuttoned Humboldt behind closed doors: “He has the most malicious tongue of any man I know and the best heart.” He never married. His close friendships with men have led many to suppose he was gay, but he destroyed all his personal papers so the evidence either way is thin. Firsthand testimonies of his participation in the lively subculture of nineteenth-century Berlin mostly consist of dark mutterings about his consorting with “obscene, dissolute youths” and tend to come from the more conservative and religious-minded of his younger colleagues. There is also the mystery of why he bequeathed his whole estate to an elderly male valet, but again that hardly offers conclusive proof of anything, especially as he had no immediate heirs. We’ll never know for sure. It may have been that, like Mary Kingsley, he suppressed whatever sexual urges he had in order to concentrate on his work. This was a man, after all, who survived for eight decades on no more than four hours’ sleep a night.

  Humboldt ended his life in triumph. As he approached seventy, after most of us have retired, he conceived his crowning achievement: “I have the crazy idea to represent in one work the entire material universe.” The five volumes of Kosmos pulled together his experience of more than half a century at the front line of scientific research. The product of what he called his “improbable years,” it was a magnificent achievement, rap rously received across Europe and in America. Humboldt lived to see all but the last volume published and died quietly in his sleep just a few months short of his ninetieth birthday.

  After his death, Humboldt’s reputation plummeted rapidly. His works were hardly read at all in the first half of the twentieth century and far more people today recognize the names of Linnaeus and Darwin. Given the preeminence he had enjoyed during his lifetime, this is hard to understand. It may be that Humboldt’s work, for all its density and richness of detail, lacks what his greatest disciple, Charles Darwin, could offer: a simple, organizing theory that binds it all together. Fascinating as Kosmos is to read, most of the science in it has been superseded by more recent research. Nevertheless, if the last 150 years of biology have been a series of footnotes to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Humboldt’s time is now. Faced with the possibility of catastrophic global warming, we can see just how prescient he had been about the earth as a single system. Darwin might have helped us join the dots in the tree of life, but to comprehend the climatic and geological forces that create and sustain it, Humboldt is still the man.

  His work is imbued with the spirit of liberty and freedom that had animated the revolutions in America and France. His experiences in South America left him with a strong distaste for colonialism, for much the same reason as Mary Kingsley: It demeaned both parties. And Kosmos makes his views on race plain: “While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men…. All are in like degree designed for freedom.”

  Darwin enthusiastically endorsed this sentiment, but one of the unforeseen consequences of his evolutionary theory was that it encouraged the idea that human beings were “improvable.” In the last paragraph of The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin writes: “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale.” The crucial phrase here is “not through his own exertions.” Man has been “improved” by the operations of natural selection, not by the imposition of his own will. Darwin’s point is that for all man’s noble qualities and achievements, he still bears the “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

  At some point, this distinction became confused in the otherwise brilliantly original mind of his cousin and occasional collaborator, the statistician Francis Galton (1822–1911). Galton will forever be associated with the theory of eugenics (from the Greek for “well born”), which proposed that selective breeding could be used to create a race of fitter, stronger, and more intelligent humans. “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” he wrote. The idea of breeding out the bad traits in humanity isn’t intrinsically immoral; it’s just based on bad science. There is no evidence that intelligence, still less virtue, is inherited. But Galton believed it and convinced many others it was true. H. G. Wells, Sylvia Pankhurst, George Bernard Shaw, and John Maynard Keynes were all eugenicists. Their motivations were honorable—they genuinely thought that “breeding out badness” would deliver a better world. But the potential applications of Galton’s ideas—most notably in Nazi Germany—have made eugenics a word that produces a shudder of disgust.

  Galton’s intellectual pedigree was impeccable. He shared a grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, with his cousin Charles, and the families were closely interknit (two of Francis’s brothers were called Erasmus and Darwin). The Darwins were doctors and scientists; the Galtons were free-thinking Quaker bankers. Both families had produced members of the Royal Society and both helped found the Lunar Society, the influential think tank of industrialists, scientists, and philosophers that included James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah Wedgwood. Young Francis was an infant prodigy. He learned to read at two and a half and got extra coaching from his older sister Adele, who had a congenital spinal defect that confined her to the house. She proved to be a talented teacher, though her baby brother took most of the credit:

  I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10. I can also say the pence table. I read French a little and I know the Clock.

  This conceitedness, amusingly forgivable in a precocious child, never left Galton. He was clever but socially inept. At the age of five he was sent to a small school in Birmingham. He hated it. “No one had heard of, let alone read, The Iliad,” he complained. The narrowness of the curriculum oppressed him and turned him into a disruptive influence. This carried over into his studies at medical school. Always suspicious of received wisdom, he decided to try all the drugs on himself, working his way through them alphabetically. He got as far as croton oil, a powerful purgative. He took two drops, thinking such a small amount wouldn’t have much effect, but it produced such alarmingly unpleasant results that he abandon
ed both the experiment and medicine altogether. He switched to mathematics, enrolling at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1840.

  Galton loved the social life at Cambridge and, much like his cousin Charles, made no great impression there academically. At the end of his fourth year, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He later claimed he had a “sprained brain” from working too hard, but he left with a “pass,” the lowest level of degree awarded. Shortly after this, he was dealt a further blow by the death of his father. But like Humboldt and Mary Kingsley, once the initial grief passed, he realized he was free. What’s more, he discovered he was extremely rich. And like Humboldt and Mary Kingsley, he decided to travel.

  He made his first foray to Egypt and the Sudan, crossing the Nubian Desert by camel and learning Arabic. While sailing down the Nile at night, a shore party set off to shoot a hippo, but mistaking their target in the dark, they bagged a cow that had come down to the water’s edge to drink. They had to leave in a hurry. Nor did Dalton make it to his intended destination—the Holy Land. In Damascus his faithful servant Ali died of violent dysentery. Again, Dalton had to make tracks, pursued by a horde of Ali’s “grieving relatives” with threats of legal action (or worse). He arrived back in London with two monkeys, a bad case of gonorrhea contracted from a prostitute, and a strong desire to improve his marksmanship. The monkeys perished when a friend’s landlady left them in a cold scullery overnight, but the venereal disease was treated successfully, and Galton spent a good deal of the next three years teaching himself to shoot on various Scottish estates. By 1850 he was ready to risk the tropics again. He bought a papier-mâché crown in Drury Lane, announced his intention to place it on the head of “the greatest or most distant potentate I should meet with,” and set off to unmapped South West Africa. His thousand-mile accident-prone journey produced two very successful books. The first, Tropical South Africa (1852), won him the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal and a Fellowship of the Royal Society. The second, The Art of Travel (1855), a practical handbook, quickly became an essential part of any gentleman’s traveling kit, stuffed with useful tips on making your own pemmican, catching fish without a line, and managing “savages.” He advised: “A frank, joking but determined manner, joined with an air of showing more confidence in the good faith of the natives than you really feel is the best.”

  In South West Africa, Galton developed the fixation for statistics that would become his lifelong trademark. Adopting the motto “Whenever you can, count,” he fastidiously measured everything he came across: horses, cats, plants, human head shapes, portraits, reaction times. He surveyed the heights of mountains by climbing them and boiling kettles at regular intervals to ascertain their altitude, and he devised a method for measuring the size of African women’s breasts and buttocks by using a sextant. When he finally reached his goal, placing his paper crown on the head of the immensely fat King Nangoro, chief of the Ovambo in northern Namibia, he passed up the chance to verify his instrumental readings at first hand. The chief offered him, by way of thanks, “temporary marriage” to his daughter. When the girl arrived in his tent, naked, smeared with red ochre and butter, Galton ejected her “with scant ceremony.” He had no intention of letting her spoil his white linen suit.

  His compulsion for measurement continued on his return to England. He kept a homemade pin-and-paper device in his pocket allowing him to record data unobtrusively. A trip around the country notating the frequency of attractive women led to his publication of a “beauty map” of Britain, stating that London, proportionally speaking, had the most beauties and Aberdeen the highest concentration of the “repellent.” At one rather dreary meeting at the Royal Geographical Society he created a “boredom” chart, logging the total number of fidgets per minute. He mapped optimists and pessimists, people with blond hair and blue eyes, and scoured international court cases to come up with his “honesty” index. Britain (naturally) came out on top, while Greece was “the center of gravity for lying.” He “proved” that prayer was ineffective by noting the average ages of the British royal family (for whom, in those days, every congregation in the country dutifully prayed each Sunday) and demonstrating that they lived no longer than anyone else. He even developed a mathematical formula for a perfect cup of tea, designing and building his own thermometer to test it. (The water, according to Galton, should be 82–87 °C and sit on the leaves for precisely eight minutes—the result will be “full bodied, full tasted, and in no way bitter or flat.”)

  In more than three hundred books and articles, Galton alternated between serious scientist and mad expert. For every Gumption-Reviver Machine (a mobile dripping tap positioned above the head to keep students alert) there were genuine scientific insights. His pioneering work in meteorology produced the first working weather map. His “anthropometric laboratory,” based in the South Kensington Museum in London, collated the measurements of almost ten thousand human bodies, revealing for the first time that fingerprints were unique and invariable throughout a person’s life. Galton’s two-hundred-page book Finger Prints (1890) led to the adoption of fingerprint identification by the Metropolitan Police.

  Galton had always had a knack of seeing patterns in pages of dull numerical data that eluded other people. His cousin’s publication of On the Origin of Species had a galvanizing effect on him. He became fascinated by the idea of measuring the apparently random variations produced by natural selection. By plotting the height of parents against that of their offspring he noticed that exceptionally tall parents tended to have children who were shorter than they were. In fact, by drawing a line on his graph he was able to show that their offspring were only two-thirds as exceptional. Galton had uncovered a mathematical law: “regression toward the mean,” the tendency for a series of measurements over time to move closer to the average point. This was a major breakthrough, especially for a mathematician of unexceptional ability, and it was to transform statistics into a proper science. There was “scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the Law,” wrote Galton with characteristic immodesty. “It would have been personified by the Greeks, and deified, if they had known of it.” Outstanding though it undoubtedly was, Galton came unstuck when he tried to apply the law to far more complex human qualities, such as intelligence.

  In Hereditary Genius (1864) he became the first person to frame the “nature versus nurture” debate, and the opening sentence makes plain which side he is on: “I propose to show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance.” What follows is an attempt to prove that “greatness” runs in families. It is full of powerful ideas and the statistical evidence is impressively marshaled—Darwin said that he did not “think that ever in all my life I read anything more interesting or original”—but it is also willfully selective. Geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Faraday, whose families showed no obvious aptitude for art or science, are omitted. The argument is based on a false premise; Galton’s own experiments had shown that the expression of intelligence can be markedly different even between identical twins, and there is, in fact, no single “intelligence” gene. Worse, the work is disfigured by a casual racism that today is deeply uncomfortable to read. In the chapter “The Comparative Worth of Different Races,” Galton places human intelligence in a hierarchy with the ancient Greeks at the top, two classes above the average Anglo-Saxon, who is in turn two classes above black Africans, with Australian Aboriginals at the bottom. “The number among the negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men,” Galton blithely opined, “is very large.”

  Galton was knighted in 1909 and died two years later, just a few months before he turned ninety, like Humboldt. Eccentric to the last, he experimented with controlling his bronchial problems by smoking hashish. To the very end, he was sure he knew best. Odd as he undoubtedly was—inventing ridiculous gadgets like underwater spectacles so he could read in the bath—he was also one of the most respected and influential members of the
Victorian scientific establishment and feted as one of the great men of his day. The final irony is that, for all his eugenicist talk of creating a “better” world by sterilizing “those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism,” it was Galton himself who died childless.