The Invention of Nature (37 page)

When thirty-two-year-old Darwin arrived at Murchison’s house, he saw an old man with a mop of silver-grey hair, dressed as he had been during his Russia expedition in a dark tailcoat and a white necktie. This was his ‘cosmopolitan outfit’, as Humboldt called it, because it was suitable for all occasions whether he met kings or students. At seventy-two, Humboldt’s walking had become more careful and slower, but he still knew how to work a room. When he arrived at a party or gathering, he usually shuffled through the room, his head slightly tilted and nodding to the left and right as he passed the others. Throughout this opening sequence, Humboldt’s flow of words did not stop once. From the moment he entered a room, everybody else fell silent. Any comment made by someone else only inspired Humboldt to make yet another long philosophical excursion.

Darwin was stunned. Several times he tried to get in a word but eventually gave up. Humboldt was cheerful enough and paid him ‘some tremendous compliments’ but the old man just talked too much. Humboldt gushed on for three long hours, chattering away ‘beyond all reason’, Darwin said. This was not how he had envisaged their first encounter. After all those years of worshipping Humboldt, and of admiring his books, Darwin felt a little deflated. ‘But my anticipations probably were too high,’ he later admitted.

Humboldt’s endless monologue made it impossible for Darwin to have a meaningful conversation with him. As Humboldt’s lecture continued, Darwin’s thoughts drifted in and out. Then he suddenly heard Humboldt talking about a river in Siberia where the vegetation on the opposite banks was ‘widely different’ despite the same soil and climate. Darwin’s interest was piqued. The plants on one side of the river were predominantly Asian and on the other European, Humboldt reported. Darwin caught just enough to be intrigued but had missed much of the detail in Humboldt’s barrage of words – yet he didn’t dare interrupt. Back at home, Darwin immediately scribbled everything he could remember in his notebook. But he was unsure if he had understood the older scientist correctly: ‘have two Floras marched from opposite sides & met here?? – strange case,’ Darwin wrote.

Darwin was thinking and collecting material for his ‘species theory’. Seen from the outside, Darwin’s life ran like ‘Clockwork’, as he said, built around a routine of work, meals and family time. He had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839, a little more than two years after his return from the Beagle voyage, and they now lived with their two young children in London.2 In his mind, though, Darwin was engaged with the most revolutionary thoughts. He was also often ill, suffering from headaches, abdominal pain, fatigue and inflammation of his face, but he still produced essays and books, all the while deliberating about evolution.

Most of the arguments he would present years later in his Origin of Species had already crystallized, but the meticulous Darwin was not rushing to publish anything that was not solidly argued and underpinned with facts. Just as he had written a list of the pros and cons of marriage before proposing to Emma, so he would bring together everything related to his theory of evolution before presenting it to the world.

If the two men had talked properly that day, perhaps Humboldt would have discussed his ideas of a world governed not by balance and stability but by dynamic change – thoughts that he would soon introduce in the first volume of Cosmos. A species was a part of the whole, linked both to the past and future, Humboldt would write, more mutable than ‘fixed’. In Cosmos he would also discuss the missing links and the ‘intermediate steps’ that could be found in the fossil records. He would write about ‘cyclical change’, transitions and constant renewal. In short, Humboldt’s nature was in flux. All these ideas were precursors to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Humboldt was, as scientists later said, a ‘pre-Darwinian Darwinist’.3

As it was, Darwin never talked with Humboldt about these ideas, but the story about the river in Siberia continued to occupy him. Then, in January 1845, three years after Humboldt’s visit to London, Darwin’s close friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, went to Paris. Knowing that Humboldt was also in Paris on one of his research trips, Darwin used the opportunity to ask Hooker to enquire further about the conundrum of the flora at the Siberian river. He insisted that Hooker first remind Humboldt that Darwin’s whole life had been shaped by his Personal Narrative. With the flattery out of the way, Darwin instructed Hooker then to ask Humboldt ‘about the river in NE Europe, with the Flora very different on its opposite banks’.

Hooker booked himself into the same hotel as Humboldt, the Hôtel de Londres in Saint-Germain. As always Humboldt was happy to assist, but it also helped that Hooker furnished him with information about Antarctica. A little more than a year previously, Hooker had returned from a four-year voyage that was part of the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’. He had joined Captain James Clark Ross’s search for the magnetic South Pole – an expedition which was the British response to Humboldt’s call for a global network of observation points.

Like Darwin, the twenty-seven-year-old Hooker had turned Humboldt into a hero of almost mythical proportions in his mind. When he met the seventy-five-year-old in Paris, Hooker was at first disappointed. ‘To my horror,’ Hooker said, he saw a ‘punchy little German’ instead of the dashing six-foot-tall explorer he had imagined. Hooker’s reaction was typical. Many others assumed that the legendary German would be more imposing and ‘Jupiter-like’. Humboldt had never been particularly tall and broad, but as he grew older he stooped and had become even thinner. To Hooker it seemed impossible that this small withered man had ever climbed Chimborazo, but he quickly recovered and was soon charmed by the older scientist.

They talked about mutual friends in Britain and about Darwin. Hooker was amused by Humboldt’s habit of quoting himself and his books, but was impressed by how sharp he still was. His memory and ‘capability for generalising’, he said, were ‘quite marvellous’. Hooker only wished that Darwin had joined him because together they would have been able to answer all Humboldt’s questions. Of course Humboldt talked without interruption as always, Hooker reported to Darwin, but ‘his mind was still vigorous’. Nothing proved this more than his response to Darwin’s query about the river in Siberia. It was the Obi, Hooker reported, the river that Humboldt had crossed in order to reach Barnaul after racing through the anthrax-infested steppe in Russia. Humboldt told Hooker everything he knew about the distribution of Siberian plants, even though more than fifteen years had passed since the Russian expedition. ‘I do not suppose that he drew breath for 20 minutes,’ Hooker wrote to Darwin.

Then, to Hooker’s amazement, Humboldt showed him the proofs of the first volume of Cosmos. Hooker couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Like everybody else in the scientific world Hooker ‘had given Kosmos up’, because it had taken Humboldt more than a decade to complete the first volume. Knowing that Darwin would be equally excited about the news, Hooker immediately informed his friend.

Two months later, at the end of April 1845, the first volume was finally published in Germany. The wait had been worth it. Cosmos became an instant bestseller with more than 20,000 copies of the German edition sold in the first couple of months. Within a few weeks Humboldt’s publisher was reprinting and over the next few years translations – his ‘non-German Cosmos children’, as Humboldt called them – were issued in English, Dutch, Italian, French, Danish, Polish, Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian.

Cosmos was unlike any previous book about nature. Humboldt took his readers on a journey from outer space to earth, and then from the surface of the planet into its inner core. He discussed comets, the Milky Way and the solar system as well as terrestrial magnetism, volcanoes and the snow line of mountains. He wrote about the migration of the human species, about plants and animals and the microscopic organisms that live in stagnant water or on the weathered surface of rocks. Where others insisted that nature was stripped of its magic as humankind penetrated into its deepest secrets, Humboldt believed exactly the opposite. How could this be, Humboldt asked, in a world in which the coloured rays of an aurora ‘unite in a quivering sea flame’, creating a sight so otherworldly ‘the splendour of which no description can reach’? Knowledge, he said, could never ‘kill the creative force of imagination’ – instead it brought excitement, astonishment and wondrousness.

The most important part of Cosmos was the long introduction of almost one hundred pages. Here Humboldt spelled out his vision – of a world that pulsated with life. Everything was part of this ‘never-ending activity of the animated forces’, Humboldt wrote. Nature was a ‘living whole’ where organisms were bound together in a ‘net-like intricate fabric’.

The rest of the book was composed of three parts: the first on celestial phenomena; the second on the earth which included geomagnetism, oceans, earthquakes, meteorology and geography; and the third on organic life which encompassed plants, animals and humans. Cosmos was an exploration of the ‘wide range of creation’, bringing together a far greater range of subjects than any previous book. But it was more than just a collection of facts and knowledge, such as Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie, for instance, because Humboldt was most interested in connections. Humboldt’s discussion of climate was just one example that revealed how different his approach was. Where other scientists focused only on meteorological data such as temperature and weather, Humboldt was the first to understand climate as a system of complex correlations between the atmosphere, oceans and landmasses. In Cosmos he wrote of the ‘perpetual interrelationship’ between air, winds, ocean currents, elevation and the density of plant cover on land.

The breadth was incomparable to any other publication. And amazingly, Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word ‘God’. Yes, Humboldt’s nature was ‘animated by one breath – from pole to pole, one life is poured on rocks, plants, animals, and even into the swelling breast of man’, but that breath came from the earth itself, and was not instigated by any divine agency. To those who knew him this was no surprise, because Humboldt had never been devout; quite the opposite. Throughout his life, he had highlighted the terrible consequences of religious fanaticism. He had criticized missionaries in South America, as well as the Church in Prussia. Instead of God, Humboldt spoke of a ‘wonderful web of organic life’.4

The world was electrified. ‘Were the republic of letters to alter its constitution,’ one reviewer of Cosmos wrote, ‘and choose a sovereign, the intellectual sceptre would be offered to Alexander von Humboldt.’ In the history of publishing, the book’s popularity was ‘epoch making’, Humboldt’s German publisher announced. He had never seen so many orders – not even when Goethe had published his masterpiece Faust.

Students read Cosmos, as did scientists, artists and politicians. Prince von Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor of State, who had so disagreed with Humboldt about reforms and revolutions, now brushed politics aside and enthused that only Humboldt was capable of such great work. Poets admired it, as did musicians, with the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz declaring Humboldt a ‘dazzling’ writer. The book was so popular among musicians, Berlioz said, that he knew one who had ‘read, re-read, pondered and understood’ Cosmos during his breaks at opera performances when his colleagues played on.

In England Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, requested a copy, while Darwin professed himself impatient for the English translation. Within weeks of the book’s publication in Germany and France, a pirated English language edition had begun to circulate – translated in such execrable prose that Humboldt worried it might ‘severely damage’ his reputation in Britain. His ‘poor Cosmos’ had been butchered and was unreadable in this version.

When Hooker got hold of a copy, he offered it to Darwin. ‘Are you really sure you can spare Cosmos’, Darwin wrote to Hooker in September 1845, ‘I am very anxious to read it.’ Less than two weeks later he had studied it but it was the pirated copy. Darwin despaired about the ‘wretched English’, but was still impressed as it was ‘an exact expression of ones own thoughts’, and was keen to discuss Cosmos with Hooker. He told Charles Lyell that he was astonished by the ‘vigour & information’. Some parts were a little disappointing, Darwin thought, because they just seemed repetitions from Personal Narrative, but others were ‘admirable’. He was also flattered that Humboldt had mentioned his Voyage of the Beagle. A year later, when an authorized translation of Cosmos was published by John Murray, Darwin rushed out and bought it.

Despite the huge success, Humboldt remained insecure. He never forgot a bad review – and as before when Personal Narrative had been published it was the conservative British Quarterly Review that was critical. Hooker told Darwin that Humboldt was ‘very wroth at the Quarterly Review Article upon Cosmos’. When the second volume was published two years later, in 1847, Humboldt became so concerned about its reception that he begged his publisher to be honest with him. There was no reason to worry. People fought ‘real battles’ for copies, Humboldt’s publisher wrote, and their offices were ‘downright looted’. Bribes were offered and parcels of books destined for booksellers in St Petersburg and London were intercepted and diverted by agents intent on supplying their desperate customers in Hamburg and Vienna.

In the second volume Humboldt took his readers on a voyage of the mind, through human history from ancient civilizations to modern times. No scientific publication had ever attempted anything similar. No scientist had written about poetry, art and gardens, and about agriculture and politics, as well as about feelings and emotions. The second volume of Cosmos was a history of ‘poetic descriptions of nature’ and landscape painting through the ages from the Greeks and Persians to modern literature and art. It was also a history of science, discovery and exploration, covering everything from Alexander the Great to the Arabic world, from Christopher Columbus to Isaac Newton.