Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist and explorer of his
day. "I view him as one of the greatest ornaments of the age," wrote
Thomas Jefferson, and he received Humboldt in the White House in 1804.
Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated Humboldt as "one of those wonders of the
world," and John Muir exclaimed, "How intensely I desire to be a
Humboldt!" The great German poet Goethe was Humboldt's friend, and after
reading Humboldt's work Charles Darwin, yearned to travel to distant
lands. From Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California to Humboldthain
park in Berlin, from South America's Humboldt Current to Greenland's
Humboldt Glacier, numerous places, plants, and animals around the world
are named after him.
Born in Berlin in 1769, the young Alexander von Humboldt moved in the
circles of Romantic writers and thinkers, studied mining, and worked as
an inspector of mines before his "longing for wide and unknown things"
made him resign and begin his great scientific expedition. For five
years, from 1799 to 1804, Humboldt traveled through Central and South
America. He and his collaborator, the French botanist Aimé Bonpland,
journeyed on foot, by boat, and with mules through grasslands and
forests, on rivers and across mountain ranges, and when Humboldt
returned to Europe his coffers were full of scientific treasures. His
legacy includes a sprawling body of knowledge, from the charge found in
electric eels to the distribution of plants across different climate
zones, and from the bioluminescence of jellyfish to the composition of
falling stars.
But the achievements for which Humboldt was most celebrated in his
lifetime fell short of perfection. When he climbed the Chimborazo in
Ecuador, then believed to be the highest mountain in the world, he did
not quite reach the top; he established the existence of the Casiquiare,
a natural canal between the vast water systems of the Orinoco and the
Amazon, but this had been known to local people; and his magisterial
work, Cosmos, was left unfinished. All of this was no coincidence.
Humboldt's pursuit of an all-encompassing, immersive approach to science
was a way of finding limits: of nature and of the scientist's own
self.
What Humboldt handed down to us is a radically new vision of science:
one that has its roots in Romanticism. Seeking the hidden connections of
things, he put his finger on the spot where nature and human art
correspond. In his understanding, nature is not just an object, separate
from us, to be prodded and measured, but something to which we have a
deep, sensual affinity, and where the human mind must turn if it wants
to truly come to understand itself.
Humboldt achieved this ambition--he was transformed by his experience of
nature. He returned to Europe at peace with the person he was, and came
to live in Paris for twenty years, then in Berlin, until his death in
1859--the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
In this concise, illuminating biography, Maren Meinhardt beautifully
portrays an exceptional life lived in no less exceptional times. Drawing
extensively on Humboldt's letters and published works, she persuasively
tells the story of how he became the most admired scientist of the
Romantic Age.
