Chapter Seven

Life is mysterious

Alexander von Humboldt: master of Infographics.   He tried to capture relationships between phenomena most ambitiously in his massive cross-section of Chimborazo in 1807. [source mappingthenation.com]

7.1 As has been said, Isaac Newton inspired generations of scientists to explore "the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles": to explore, find, measure, describe and record every detail, and think upon what they found, and thereby perhaps to discover new laws as fundamental to the motion of all things as his.  One such scientist was Alexander von Humboldt, born in 1769 some 43 years after Newton’s death. He was one of the most famous scientists of the 19^th century but is now largely forgotten, except for the fact that more things in nature are named after him than anyone else. Andrea Wulf has done a great service to him and to us in her recent biography “The Invention of Nature”.

7.2 To quote the book’s cover, “His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy’s Own story. Humboldt explored deep into the rain forest, climbed the world’s highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike. Napoleon was jealous of him, Simon Bolivar’s revolution was fuelled by his ideas: Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He was simply, as one contemporary put it, ‘the greatest man since the Deluge.”

7.3 And that is not to mention his impact on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet and one of the most brilliant minds the world has known. Here is Andrea’s marvelous description of their coming together.

7.4 [By 1794] Goethe had become the Zeus of Germany’s intellectual circles, towering above all other poets and writers, but he could also be a ‘cold, mono-syllabled God”. Some described him as melancholic, others a arrogant, proud and bitter. Goethe had never been a great listener if the topic was not to his liking and could end a discussion with a blatant display of his lack of interest or by abruptly changing the subject. He was sometimes so rude particularly to young poets and thinkers that they regularly ran out of the room. None of this mattered to his admirers. The ‘sacred poetic fire’, as one British visitor to Weimar said, had only burned to perfection in Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare and no it did so in Goethe.

7.5 But Goethe wasn’t happy. ‘No one was more isolated than I was then. He was more fascinated by nature = ‘the great mother’ – than by people. His large house in Weimar’s town centre reflected his tastes and status, It was elegantly furnished, filled with art and Italian statues and also with vast collections or rocks, fossils and dried Plants. At the back of the house was a suite of plainer rooms that Goethe used as his study and library, overlooking a garden that he had designed for scientific study. In one corner of the garden was the small building that housed his huge geological collection.

7.6  His favourite place, though, was his Garden House near the River Ilm, outside the old city walls on the duke’s estate. Just a ten-minute walk from his main residence, this small cosy house had been his first home in Weimar, but now it was his refuge where he withdrew from the continuous stream of visitors. Here he wrote, gardened or welcomed his most intimate friends. Vines and sweet-scented honeysuckle climbed along the walls and windows. There were vegetable plots, a meadow with fruit trees and a long path lined with Goethe’s beloved hollyhocks. When Goethe had first moved there is 1776, he had not only planted his own garden but had also convinced the duke to transform the castle’s formal baroque garden into a fashionable English landscape park where irregularly planted groves of trees gave a natural feel.

7.7  Goethe ‘was getting tired of the world’. The Reign of Terror in France had turned the initial idealism of the 1789 revolution in to a bloody reality of mass executions of tens of thousands of so-called enemies of the revolution.   This brutality, along with the ensuing violence that the Napoleonic Wars spread across Europe, had disillusioned Goethe, putting him in the most melancholic mood’ As armies marched through Europe, he worried about the threats that faced Germany. He lived like a hermit, he said, and the only thing that kept him going were his scientific studies. Science for him was like a ‘plank in a shipwreck’.

7.8 Today Goethe is famed for his literary works but he was a passionate scientist too, fascinated by the formation of the earth as well as botany. He had a rock collection that eventually numbered 18,000 specimens. As Europe descended into war, he quietly worked on comparative anatomy and optics. In the year of Humboldt’s first visit, he established a botanical garden at the University of Jena. He wrote an essay, the <em>Metamorphosis of Plants</em>, in which he argued that there was an archetypal, or primordial, form underlying the world of plants. The idea was that each plant was the variation of such an <em>urform</em>, the basic shape from which all others had developed – the petals, the calyx and so on. ‘Forward and backs the plant is always nothing by leaf,’ he said.

7.9  These were exciting ideas, but Goethe had no scientific sparring partner with whom to develop his theories. All that changed when he met Humboldt. It was as if Humboldt ignited the spark that had been missing for so long. When Goethe was with Humboldt his mind worked in all direction. He pulled out old notebooks, books and drawings. Papers piled up on the table as they discussed botanical and zoological theories.” And the idea that burned at the centre of their relationship and at the core of Humboldt’s entire career, was that all the infinite variety of nature everywhere across the globe was somehow related and driven by <strong>some fundamental laws of development, as yet undiscovered. </strong>

7.10 Yet again mountains and water feature in our story, as with Dr Servettaz and the story of Lake Annecy, as Humboldt spent his entire life in scientific expeditions to the farthest flung regions of the world. He travelled to Ecuador to climb what was then thought to be the highest mountain in the world, Chimborazo. This volcano was what inspired Simon Bolivar to write a poem about the liberation of the Spanish colonies in South America. Humboldt found his inspiration in examining all the various forms of life he could find, plants, birds, animals and insects and in particular noting there variation as they climbed up the mountain. And as he reflected upon these changes he compared them with what he had found on other mountain ranges on other continents. And there he began to see elements of uniformity amidst this extravagant variety.

Continue Reading  Chapter Eight