The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  As soon as he came, he was ready to leave. How was he to work here and find enough like-minded scientists? There wasn’t even a university in the city, and the ground, he said, was ‘burning under my feet’. By contrast, King Friedrich Wilhelm III was delighted to have the most famous Prussian back. Celebrated across Europe for his daring explorations, Humboldt would be a great ornament at court, and the king granted him a generous yearly pension of 2,500 thalers with absolutely no obligations attached. This was a large sum at a time when skilled craftsmen such as carpenters and joiners earned less than 200 thalers annually, but perhaps not when compared to the 13,400 thalers that his brother Wilhelm earned as a Prussian ambassador. The king also made Humboldt his chamberlain, again with no apparent conditions. Having spent much of his inheritance, Humboldt needed the money but at the same time found the king’s attentions ‘almost oppressive’.

  A dour and frugal man, Friedrich Wilhelm III was no inspiring ruler. He was neither a pleasure-seeker nor an art lover like his father, Friedrich Wilhelm II, and lacked any of the military and scientific brilliance of his great-uncle, Frederick the Great. Instead he was fascinated by clocks and uniforms – so much so that Napoleon reputedly once said that Friedrich Wilhelm III should have been a tailor because ‘he always knows how many yards of cloth are needed for a soldier’s uniform’.

  Embarrassed by the ties that would now bind him to the court, Humboldt asked his friends to keep the royal appointment quiet. And perhaps with good reason, because some were shocked to see the apparently fiercely independent and pro-revolutionary Humboldt making himself subservient to the king. His friend Leopold von Buch complained that Humboldt now spent more time at the king’s palaces than the courtiers themselves. Instead of concentrating on his scientific studies, Buch said, Humboldt was immersed in court gossip. The accusation was slightly unfair because Humboldt was far more absorbed in scientific matters than in royal affairs. Though he had to be at court regularly, he also found time to lecture at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, to write and to continue the comparative magnetic observations that he had begun in South America.

  An old family acquaintance and wealthy distillery owner offered Humboldt his garden house to live in. His estate bordered the River Spree and was just a few hundred yards north of the famous boulevard Unter den Linden. The little garden house was simple but perfect – it saved Humboldt money and allowed him to concentrate on his magnetic observations. He built a small hut in the garden for that purpose, and in order not to influence the measurements had it constructed without a single piece or nail made of iron. At one stage he and a colleague spent several days taking data from the instruments every half-hour – day and night – getting only snatches of sleep in between. The experiment resulted in 6,000 measurements but also left them somewhat exhausted.

  Then, in early April 1806, after a full year in Humboldt’s company, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac returned to Paris. Humboldt was unhappy and lonely in Berlin and wrote to a friend a few days later that he was living ‘isolated and as a stranger’. Prussia felt like a foreign country. Humboldt was also worried about his botanical publications for which Bonpland had taken responsibility. These were specialized books for scientists and based on the plant collections they had acquired in Latin America. As a trained botanist, Bonpland was more suited for the task than Humboldt. Bonpland, however, did his best to ignore the work. He had never enjoyed the laborious chore of describing plant specimens and writing, infinitely preferring the richness of the rainforest to the tedium of his desk. Frustrated with the slow progress, Humboldt repeatedly urged Bonpland to work faster. When Bonpland finally sent some proof pages to Berlin, the meticulous Humboldt was irritated by the many mistakes. Bonpland was a little too relaxed about accuracy, Humboldt thought, ‘in particular concerning the Latin descriptions and numbers’.

  Bonpland refused to be rushed, and when he then announced his intention of leaving Paris on another exploration, Humboldt despaired. Having given away his own plant specimens to collectors across Europe and being busy with his many other book projects, he needed Bonpland to concentrate on the botanical work. Humboldt was slowly losing his patience. But there was not much he could do, other than continue to bombard his old friend with letters – a mixture of cajoling, grumbling and pleading.

  Humboldt himself had been more diligent and had completed the first volume of what would eventually become the thirty-four-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The book was called Essay on the Geography of Plants, and was published in French and German. It included the magnificent drawing of his so-called Naturgemälde – the visualization of the idea he had conceived in South America, of nature made up of connections and unity. The main text of the book was largely an explanation of the drawing, like a commentary on the image or a very long caption. ‘I wrote the major part of this work in the very presence of the objects I was going to describe, at the foot of the Chimborazo, on the coasts of the South Sea,’ Humboldt wrote in the preface of the book.

  The three-foot by two-foot hand-coloured engraving was a large fold-out and showed the correlation of climate zones and plants according to latitude and altitude. It was based on the sketch Humboldt had drawn after his climb of Chimborazo. Humboldt was now ready to present to the world a completely new way of looking at plants, and he had decided to do so with a drawing. The Naturgemälde depicted Chimborazo in cross-section and the distribution of plants from the valley to the snow line. Written into the sky next to the mountain were the heights of other mountains as a visual comparison: Mont Blanc, Vesuvius, Cotopaxi, as well as the height that Gay-Lussac had reached during his balloon ascents in Paris. Humboldt also marked the altitude that he, Bonpland and Montúfar had climbed to on Chimborazo – and couldn’t refrain from listing, below his own record, the lower height that La Condamine and Bouguer had reached in the 1730s. To the left and right of the mountain were several columns with comparative data about gravity, temperature, chemical composition of the air and the boiling point of water amongst other things – all arranged according to altitude. Everything was put into perspective and compared.

  Humboldt used this new visual approach so that he could appeal to his readers’ imagination, he told a friend, because ‘the world likes to see’. The Essay on the Geography of Plants looked at plants in a wider context, viewing nature as a holistic interplay of phenomena – all of which, he said, were painted with ‘a broad brush’. It was the world’s first ecological book.

  In previous centuries, botany had been ruled by the concept of classification. Plants had often been ordered in their relationship to humankind – sometimes according to their different uses such as medicinal and ornamental, or according to their smell, taste and edibility. In the seventeenth century, during the scientific revolution, botanists had tried to group plants more rationally, based on their structural differences and similarities such as seeds, leaves, blossoms and so on. They were imposing order on nature. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had revolutionized this concept with his so-called sexual system, classifying the world of flowering plants based on the number of reproductive organs in the plants – the pistils and stamens. By the end of the eighteenth century other classification systems had become more popular but botanists had remained wedded to the idea that taxonomy was the supreme ruler of their discipline.

  Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants promoted an entirely different understanding of nature. His travels had given him a unique perspective – nowhere else than in South America, he said, did nature more powerfully suggest its ‘natural connection’. Building on ideas that he had developed over the previous years, he now translated them into a broader concept. He took, for example, his former professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s theory of the vital forces – which had declared all living matter as an organism of interconnected forces – and applied it to nature as a whole. Instead of looking only at an organism, as Blumenbach had done, Humboldt now pres
ented relationships between plants, climate and geography. Plants were grouped into zones and regions rather than taxonomic units. In the Essay Humboldt explained the idea of vegetation zones – ‘long bands’ as he called them – that were slung across the globe.1 He gave western science a new lens through which to view the natural world.

  In the Essay Humboldt underpinned his Naturgemälde with more details and explanations, adding page after page of tables, statistics and sources. Humboldt plaited together the cultural, biological and physical world, and painted a picture of global patterns.

  Over thousands of years crops, grains, vegetables and fruits had followed the footpaths of humankind. As humans crossed continents and oceans, they had brought plants with them and thereby had changed the face of the earth. Agriculture linked plants to politics and economy. Wars had been fought over plants, and empires were shaped by tea, sugar and tobacco. Some plants told him as much about humankind as about nature itself, while other plants gave Humboldt an insight into geology as they revealed how continents had shifted. The similarities of their coastal plants, Humboldt wrote, showed an ‘ancient’ connection between Africa and South America as well as illustrating how islands that were previously linked were now separated – an incredible conclusion more than a century before scientists had even begun to discuss continental movements and the theory of shifting tectonic plates. Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others did books – and to him they revealed a global force behind nature, the movements of civilizations as well as of landmass. No one had ever approached botany in this way.

  By showing unexpected analogies, the Essay, with its engraving of the Naturgemälde, unpeeled a previously invisible web of life. Connection was the basis of Humboldt’s thinking. Nature, he wrote, was ‘a reflection of the whole’ – and scientists had to look at flora, fauna and rock strata globally. Failure to do so, he continued, would make them like those geologists who constructed the entire world ‘according to the shape of the nearest hills surrounding them’. Scientists needed to leave their garrets and travel the world.

  Similarly revolutionary was Humboldt’s desire to speak to ‘our imagination and our spirit’, an aspect highlighted in the introduction of the German edition where he referred to Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the Naturphilosophie. In 1798, at the age of twenty-three, Schelling had been made a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena and had quickly become part of Goethe’s inner circle. His so-called ‘philosophy of nature’ became the theoretical backbone of German Idealism and Romanticism. Schelling called for ‘the necessity to grasp nature in her unity’. He rejected the idea of an irreconcilable chasm between the internal and the external – between the subjective world of the Self and the objective world of nature. Instead Schelling emphasized the vital force that connected nature and man, insisting that there was an organic bond between the Self and nature. ‘I myself am identical with nature,’ he claimed, a statement that paved the way for the Romantics’ belief that they could find themselves in wild nature. For Humboldt, who believed that he had only truly become himself in South America, this was a deeply appealing concept.

  Humboldt’s reference to Schelling also showed how much he himself had changed in the previous decade. By highlighting the relevance of Schelling’s ideas, Humboldt introduced a new aspect to science. Though not moving entirely away from the rational method that had been the mantra of Enlightenment thinkers, Humboldt now quietly opened the door for subjectivity. Humboldt, the former ‘Prince of Empiricism’, as a friend wrote to Schelling, had changed for good. Whereas many scientists dismissed Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as being incompatible with empirical investigation and scientific methods, Humboldt insisted that Enlightenment thought and Schelling were not ‘quarrelling poles’. Quite the contrary – Schelling’s emphasis on unity was how Humboldt also understood nature.

  Schelling suggested that the concept of an ‘organism’ should be the foundation of how to understand nature. Instead of regarding nature as a mechanical system, it should be seen as a living organism. The difference was like that between a clock and an animal. Whereas a clock consisted of parts that could be dismantled and then assembled again, an animal couldn’t – nature was a unified whole, an organism in which the parts only worked in relation to each other. In a letter to Schelling, Humboldt wrote that he believed this was nothing less than a ‘revolution’ in the sciences, a turn away from the ‘dry compilation of facts’ and ‘crude empiricism’.

  The man who had first instilled these ideas in him was Goethe. Humboldt had not forgotten how much his time in Jena had influenced him and how Goethe’s views of nature had shaped his thinking. That nature and imagination were closely interwoven in his books was the ‘influence of your work on me’, he told Goethe later. In appreciation Humboldt dedicated the Essay on the Geography of Plants to his old friend. The Essay’s frontispiece showed Apollo, the god of poetry, lifting the veil off the goddess of nature. Poetry was necessary to comprehend the mysteries of the natural world. As a return favour, Goethe had Ottilie, one of the main protagonists in his novel Elective Affinities, say, ‘How I should enjoy once hearing Humboldt talk.’

  Goethe ‘devoured’ the Essay when he received it in March 1807, and reread the book several times over the next few days. Humboldt’s new concept was so revelatory that Goethe couldn’t wait to talk about it.2 He was so inspired that he gave a botanical lecture in Jena based on the Essay two weeks later. ‘With an aesthetic breeze,’ Goethe wrote, Humboldt had lit science into a ‘bright flame’.

  Frontispiece of Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants and his dedication to Goethe (Illustration Credit 10.1)

  By the time the Essay was published in Germany in early 1807, Humboldt’s plans to return to Paris were shattered. Politics and war had once again interfered. For more than a decade, since the Peace of Basle in April 1795, Prussia had kept clear of the Napoleonic Wars as King Friedrich Wilhelm III had remained determinedly neutral in the tug-of-war that pulled Europe apart. Many had regarded this decision as a weakness and it had gained the king no popularity among the European nations fighting against France. After the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, which had brought about the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon had created the so-called Confederation of the Rhine in the summer of 1806. It was an alliance of sixteen German states with Napoleon as their ‘protector’ which functioned almost like a buffer between France and central Europe but Prussia – which was not part of the Confederation – was increasingly worried about the French encroachment on its territory. Then, in October 1806, after some border skirmishes and French provocations, the Prussians stumbled into a war against France but with no allies to support them. It was a disastrous step.

  On 14 October Napoleon’s troops annihilated the Prussian army in two battles at Jena and at Auerstedt. This single day halved the size of Prussia. With Prussia defeated, Napoleon reached Berlin two weeks later. In July 1807, the Prussians signed the Treaty of Tilsit with France, whereby France gained Prussia’s territory west of the River Elbe and parts of the eastern territories. Some of these lands were absorbed into France but Napoleon also created several new states that were independent only in name – such as the Kingdom of Westphalia that was ruled by his brother and bound to France.

  The Brandenburg Gate through which Napoleon entered Berlin triumphantly in 1806, after the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt (Illustration Credit 10.2)

  Prussia was no longer a major European power. The immense reparations imposed by the French in the Treaty of Tilsit brought the Prussian economy to a standstill. With its much reduced territory, Prussia also lost most of its centres of learning, including its largest and most famous university in Halle which was now part of the new Kingdom of Westphalia. There were only two universities left in Prussia: one in Königsberg which, after Immanuel Kant’s death in 1804, had lost its only famous professor; and the provincial institution Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder in Brandenburg where Humboldt had studied for
a semester as an eighteen-year-old.

  Humboldt felt ‘buried in the ruins of an unhappy fatherland’, he wrote to a friend. ‘Why did I not stay in the forest at the Orinoco or on the high ridges of the Andes?’ In his misery he turned to writing. In his little garden house in Berlin and surrounded by piles of notes, by his journals from Latin America and books, Humboldt was working on several manuscripts at the same time. But the one that helped him most through this difficult time was Views of Nature.

  This would be one of Humboldt’s most widely read books, a bestseller that was eventually published in eleven languages. With Views of Nature, Humboldt created a completely new genre – a book that combined lively prose and rich landscape descriptions with scientific observation in a blueprint for much of nature writing today. Of all the books he would write, this remained Humboldt’s favourite.

  In Views of Nature Humboldt conjured up the quiet solitude of Andean mountaintops and the fertility of the rainforest, as well as the magic of a meteor shower and the gruesome spectacle of catching the electric eels in the Llanos. He wrote of the ‘glowing womb of the earth’ and ‘bejewelled’ riverbanks. Here a desert became a ‘sea of sands’, leaves unfolded ‘to greet the rising sun’, and apes filled the jungle with ‘melancholy howlings’. In the mists at the rapids of the Orinoco, rainbows danced in a game of hide-and-seek – ‘optical magic’, as he called it. Humboldt created poetic vignettes when he wrote of strange insects that ‘poured their red phosphoric light on the herb-covered ground, which glowed with living fire as if the starry canopy of heaven had sunk upon the turf’.

  This was a scientific book unembarrassed by lyricism. For Humboldt the prose was as important as the content and he insisted that his publisher was not allowed to change a single syllable lest the ‘melody’ of his sentences would be destroyed. The more detailed scientific explanations – which took up a large part of the book – could be ignored by the general reader because Humboldt tucked them away in the annotations at the end of each chapter.3