Though Wilhelm had often played the disapproving older brother, he was Alexander’s only close remaining relative. “I did not think that my old eyes could have shed so many tears,” the younger Humboldt wrote his publisher after his brother’s death. “I am the unhappiest of men.” Years later, Alexander commemorated his brother by quoting, at the end of one of his own works, an essay Wilhelm had written on the brotherhood of man: “If we would indicate an idea which, throughout the whole course of history, has ever more and more widely extended its empire . . . it is that of establishing our common humanity—of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected among men, and to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation, or color, as one fraternity, one great community. . . . Thus deeply in the innermost nature of man, and even enjoined upon him by his highest tendencies, the recognition of the bond of humanity becomes one of the noblest leading principles in the history of mankind.”
In his later years, Alexander also proved himself a great friend and mentor to young scientific talent. As one of the most famous men in the world, he was able to use his influence to benefit other researchers, and over the course of his long life, many found encouragement and protection under his aegis. These included Claude-Louis Berthollet, a collaborator of Antoine Lavoisier who discovered the reversibility of chemical reactions, among other contributions to that science; zoologist Achille Valenciennes, assistant to Georges Cuvier and coauthor of the landmark twenty-two-volume work History of Fishes; and Justus von Leibig, founder of organic and agricultural chemistry, who called Humboldt “a kind friend and powerful patron for my scientific studies.” Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote, “One of the most wonderful jewels in Humboldt’s crown is the zeal with which he lends his assistance and encouragement to genius.”
Another who benefited from Humboldt’s early help was the great naturalist Louis Agassiz, to whom Humboldt extended financial support, introductions to prominent scientists, and assistance in emigrating to America. “Be happy in this new undertaking,” Humboldt wrote as the young man left Europe, “and preserve for me the first place of friendship in your heart.” Agassiz believed there was scarcely an important scientist in the world who wasn’t in Humboldt’s personal debt, and after becoming a famous professor at Harvard himself, he never forgot the older man’s unselfish patronage. Years later, he would deliver an impassioned eulogy to a large and distinguished gathering in Boston, on the occasion of Humboldt’s centenary, in which he confessed that he “loved and honored the man whose memory brings us together. . . . No man impressed his century intellectually more powerfully . . . ,” he continued. “Nor is it alone because of what he has done for science, or for any one department of research, that we feel grateful to him, but rather because of that breadth and comprehensiveness of knowledge which lifts whole communities to further levels of culture, and impresses itself upon the unlearned as well as upon students and scholars.”
Owing to his celebrity, Humboldt received thousands of letters a year and was frequently sought out by those eager to pay their respects. Some Americans even claimed that they had journeyed to Europe expressly to meet the great man. All remarked on the aging Humboldt’s hospitality, unaffected modesty, and undimmed intellect. Toward the end of Humboldt’s life, the American writer Bayard Taylor interviewed him for the New York Tribune. “He came up to me with a heartiness and cordiality which made me feel that I was in the presence of a friend, gave me his hand, and inquired whether we should converse in English or German . . . ,” Taylor wrote. “The first impression made by Humboldt’s face was that of a broad and genial humanity. . . . A pair of clear blue eyes, almost as bright and steady as a child’s, met your own. . . . His wrinkles were few and small, and his skin had a smoothness and delicacy rarely seen in old men. His hair, although snow white, was still abundant, his step slow but firm, and his manner active almost to the point of restlessness . . . ,” Taylor found. “He talked rapidly with the greatest apparent ease, never hesitating for a word. . . . He did not remain in his chair more than ten minutes at a time, frequently getting up and walking about the room. . . .”
Charles Darwin was less impressed when he met the hero of his youth for the first and only time. As he recounts in his autobiography, “I once met at breakfast at Sir Roderick Murchison’s house, the illustrious Humboldt, who honoured me by expressing a wish to see me. I was a little disappointed with the great man, but my anticipations were probably too high. I can remember nothing distinctly about our interview, except that Humboldt was very cheerful and talked much.” It seems an ungenerous assessment from the man who had claimed that he owed every professional achievement to his early reading of Humboldt’s works.
Just as Humboldt used his fame to encourage young talent, he also lent his celebrity to some of the very first international scientific collaborations. In 1828, as acting president of the Association of German Naturalists and Physicians, he presided over the organization’s annual meeting in Berlin, which drew six hundred of Europe’s most prestigious scientists, in addition to the king and assorted government ministers. Despite the organization’s title, its purpose was not to disseminate scientific information only throughout Germany, but also to promote the international spread of information. As Humboldt said in his opening address, “The Association . . . appears to us to be one of the most striking effects of the increased facility and desire of communication between different countries.” Ironically, it was Humboldt, the great synthesizer, who suggested that the meeting break up into sections based on scientific discipline, in recognition of the increasing specialization of the sciences. It was a procedure that would be increasingly adopted around the world.
“The Association of German Naturalists and Physicians . . . ,” Humboldt continued, “well deserves to be imitated in other countries. . . .” And indeed it was, serving as a model for similar organizations in Europe and America, including the British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded in 1831) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (established in 1848). Thus began the international cooperation that researchers today take for granted, in which scientific information, with few exceptions, is seen as the rightful property of all mankind, just as Humboldt envisioned.
Successful as his chairmanship was, Humboldt minimized his own role at future annual meetings, always claiming the press of work or, as he got older, the infirmities of age. In fact, he had lost his taste for the get-togethers, which he felt had degenerated into “a theatrical spectacle, where in the midst of endless feasting the vanity of learned men finds ready gratification.” However, beginning about 1830, Humboldt was the impetus behind an important early international research project, when he persuaded the British government to undertake a series of magnetic measurements in their colonies around the world—including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, St. Helena, and the Cape of Good Hope—in order to extend the map of the world’s geomagnetic field, an area of research he had pioneered that was of enduring interest to him. In recognition of his early fostering of international collaboration in the sciences, the German government has created the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to administer the country’s principal program of research grants for foreign scholars.
THOUGH he had left America with the hope of returning one day, Humboldt never visited the New Continent again. In fact, his only other major expedition was to Siberia, where he traveled in 1829, at the age of sixty, at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I. Like Charles IV of Spain some three decades before, the tsar was hoping that Humboldt would discover precious minerals—in this case gold, platinum, or diamonds in the Ural Mountains. And indeed, Humboldt did discover the country’s first diamond mine, in Siberia. Over a period of eight months, he and his party traveled some 11,500 grueling miles by coach, taking magnetic measurements and making scores of geologic and geographic observations. The journey through Russia, he wrote to Wilhelm, provided “one of the great moments of my life.”
In 1843, Humboldt published Central Asia, Researches on the Mountain Chains and Comparative Climate, a three-volume work that yielded a wealth of new information on Russia and her resources.
Late in life, Humboldt embarked on an incredibly ambitious new multivolume project, which he called Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. Its title deriving from the Greek for “world” or “order,” the massive work attempted to outline all knowledge about the physical sciences in a way that would reveal to the intelligent lay reader the order underlying the universe’s apparent chaos. The last time a single author would undertake such a wide-ranging summary, Cosmos proved Humboldt’s final, greatest, and most popular publication.
He himself called it “the work of my life,” and indeed, the idea had been gestating for five decades. In 1797, before he’d even left for America, he’d written, “I have conceived the idea of a physical description of the world. As I feel the increasing need for it, so also I see how few foundations exist for such an edifice.” In 1820, when he’d still been in Paris, he’d toyed with the idea again, but had already been overextended with his other publications. Then in 1834, he’d confessed, “I have the crazy notion to depict the entire material universe, all that we know of the phenomena of universe and earth, from spiral nebulae to the geography of mosses and granite rocks, in one work—and in a vivid language that will stimulate and elicit feeling. . . . But it is not to be taken as a physical description of earth: it comprises heaven and earth, the whole of creation.”
The idea had come to the fore again between fall 1827 and spring 1828, when Humboldt had delivered a series of sixty-one lectures at Berlin University encompassing the entire scope of the physical sciences—astronomy, geology, plant geography, geomagnetism, ocean currents, and myriad other topics. Meant to counter the unscientific, romantic speculations of the German “nature philosophers,” the university lectures proved so popular that Humboldt was induced to repeat them, as sixteen simplified installments intended for a general audience—including the entire spectrum of Berlin society, from the royal family to impoverished students—who packed a Berlin hall each week. In the words of a contemporary newspaper report, “By the lucid manner in which he grasps the facts discovered by himself and others in various branches of science and arranges them in one comprehensive view, [Humboldt] throws so clear a light upon the boundless region of the study of Nature that he has introduced a new method of treating the history of science.” The lectures proved the phenomenon of the season, and a commemorative medal was struck to memorialize the event. Humboldt’s publisher offered him a large advance to publish the lectures as they had been delivered, but he insisted on thoroughly reworking the material before setting it in print.
As a result, it was the better part of two decades before the first volume of Cosmos appeared, in 1845. The second of five eventual volumes was issued two years later, and both books became immediate best-sellers. Volume One sold out in two months, and by 1851, when Humboldt estimated eighty thousand copies had been shipped, it had been translated into virtually every European language. After the release of the second volume, Humboldt’s publisher wrote him breathlessly, “In the history of book publishing, the demand is epoch making. Book parcels destined for London and St. Petersburg were torn out of our hands by agents who wanted their orders filled for the bookstores in Vienna and Hamburg. Regular battles were fought over possession of this edition, and bribes offered. . . .”
Reviews were lavish in their praise, and the king ordered another commemorative medal struck. On the obverse was a profile of Humboldt; on the reverse, set against a background of constellations, tropical plants, and surveying equipment, were six letters: KOΣMOΣ—the word that contained an entire universe and that summarized, more than any other, Humboldt’s vision of the single, unifying force of nature. “Everything is interrelated,” he had said, and Cosmos was the work whereby he sought to prove it.
Cosmos offered a brilliant capstone to Humboldt’s life, and a premier example of his synthesizing impulse. Besides clearing away the speculative musings of the nature philosophers, the books were intended “to increase by a deeper insight into its essence the enjoyment of Nature. I cannot share the apprehension caused by a certain narrow-mindedness and clouded sentimentality that Nature loses its magic, the charm of the mysterious and the sublime, by any study of its forces . . . ,” Humboldt wrote. “We cannot concur with Burke when he says that ignorance of Nature only is the source of admiration and the feeling of the sublime.”
Though Humboldt wanted to share, through Cosmos, his lifelong love of Nature with a wide audience, he also had a more practical purpose in mind. With his unshakable belief in progress, Humboldt realized that in an increasingly technical age, mankind’s well-being would be determined in large measure by how well we mastered the transformative power of science. “Those countries which lag behind in industry,” he warned, “in the application of mechanics and technical chemistry, in the careful selection and utilization of natural products, where the respect for such activities does not permeate all classes of society, will unfailingly decline in prosperity. They will sink faster when their neighbor states, with an energetic exchange between science and industry, go forward with renewed vitality.”
Cosmos was intended to advance the betterment of mankind, by aiding the dissemination of technological know-how and by making the benefits of science available to all nations. In fact, he envisioned science as a uniting factor among peoples, “making common cause against ignorance and prejudice,” as a contemporary article in the American Review phrased it. “If the world is ever to be harmonized,” the piece continued, “it must be through a community of knowledge, for there is no other universal or non-exclusive principle in the nature of man. . . . A careful examination discovers [the first few chapters of Cosmos] to be an exposition of the very spirit of liberal culture.” Thus, with Cosmos, Humboldt sought to promote the humanitarian, democratic causes that he had espoused his entire life.
As he grew older, Humboldt’s internationalist outlook helped to spread his reputation throughout the world. His portrait hung on every continent—reportedly even in the palace of the king of Siam—and in 1852 the British Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal, its highest honor. In the expanding, practical-minded United States, blessed with tremendous natural resources and incredible natural beauty, Humboldt’s egalitarian, forward-thinking message made him enormously popular. Ever since his brief visit in 1804, he had shown a strong affection for the young republic and had followed events there with excitement—such as westward expansion and the discovery of gold in California—and apprehension—such as the continuation of slavery and the annihilation of the Native Americans. Americans had returned his affection, and dozens of places on the continent—rivers, mountains, counties—had been named in his honor. Cosmos and Aspects of Nature found a huge readership in the United States, and to the image of a brilliant scientist and liberal republican, Humboldt added that of much-loved author. With the influx of German immigrants in the nineteenth century, the Prussian’s reputation surged even higher, and in 1857, U.S. secretary of war John B. Floyd wrote him, “Never can we forget the services you have rendered not only to us but to all the world. The name of Humboldt is not only a household word throughout our immense country, from the shores of the Atlantic to the waters of the Pacific, but we have honored ourselves by its use in many parts of our territory, so that posterity will find it everywhere linked with the names of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin.”
In 1850, Humboldt published Volume Three of Cosmos. Writing from nine at night to three in the morning, after his official duties were done, he pressed ahead, getting only four or five hours’ sleep per night. Then, in 1857, as the work dragged on, Humboldt suffered a slight stroke, and he worried that he wouldn’t be able to finish his culminating work. Living beyond his contemporaries, he wrote, “I have buried all my race,” and he took to quoting Dante that life was “a race to death.” In 1858
, he published the fourth volume, though he also had a premonition that the following year would be his last. On April 19, 1859, he sent the fifth and final volume of Cosmos to his publisher. Two days later, he took to his bed. On May 6, at two-thirty in the afternoon, four months short of his ninetieth birthday, he died peacefully, with his niece Gabriele and her brother-in-law at his side. Beside his bed, they found a quotation he had copied from Genesis, the last words the prolix Humboldt ever wrote: “Thus the heavens and earth were finished, and all the host of them.”
Humboldt lay in state in his own library, and huge crowds came to pay their respects. On May 10, his body was carried in a solemn funeral procession to the Berlin Cathedral, where the prince regent met the bier on the front steps. As the cortege moved through the crepe-shrouded streets to the music of Chopin’s Funeral March, Humboldt’s laurel-and-azalea-wreathed hearse was preceded by four royal chamberlains. Twenty students marched alongside the casket, carrying palm fronds, and behind walked Humboldt’s family, followed by hundreds more students, professors, government ministers, members of parliament, magistrates, municipal authorities, churchmen, members of the academies of Science and Arts, and, finally, thousands of ordinary citizens. It was said to be the grandest nonmilitary funeral in the city’s history, with the exception of one—the tribute to the fallen revolutionaries of 1848, which Humboldt himself had led. The next day the peripatetic scientist was laid to rest at Tegel, in the family graveyard next to Wilhelm and Caroline.
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