Alexander Von Humboldt.
I have been reading this book: The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt by Andrew Wulf and Lillian Melcher.
He has written many scientific journals, but they decided to create a picture book detailing his adventures. In his writings, drawings, sketches, comics, and occasional use of Dada art, I can sense the champagne spirit of the man, to whom the adventure itself was as equal a companion to the scientific discoveries he made.
From Wikipedia, with my emphasis added:
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769–6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science.[5] He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).[6][7][8] Humboldt’s quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt’s advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.[9][10]
Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern Western scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in several volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).
Humboldt resurrected the use of the word cosmos from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multivolume treatise, Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity.[11] He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels.[12][13][14]
Nearly everyone knows of Charles Darwin, yet Von Humboldt is little known. Not many people know that Charles Darwin used much of Von Humboldt’s work to chart his own way.
Now Humboldt did not have the massive resources that Charles Darwin did. He travelled with one companion, Bonpland, seeking the permission of the King of Spain to go to the colonies in South America. They carried a heavy trunk of instruments wherever they went, and Humboldt told Bonpland that they must at all costs not lose the barometer, which he used to measure atmospheric pressure because of his fervor for recording the heights of mountains, which would lead to the infusion of weather to a topographical map.
Not only that. He rigorously recorded temperatures of each place they collected plants at. He recorded the sun’s position. He made so many geophysical records that he managed to establish the foundation of modern geography and climatology — our abilities to tell the weather, our abilities to foresee natural disasters, and so on.
“Nature was Humboldt’s teacher. And the greatest lesson that nature offered was that of freedom. ‘Nature is the domain of liberty’, Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything from the most unassuming moss or insect or elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just a small part. — Andrea Wulf
He quotes the 18th century botanist Carl Linnaeus: “Nature is made for man,” and disagrees wholeheartedly. He believes humankind is only one part of the orchestral of all living things, and had a stark prescience of man destroying the earth through deforestation, even long before the industrial age had developed fully in the 1700s.
He talked about Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy and said, “I have bigger ideas”.
He then asked, “What is the character of tropical vegetation? What features distinguish the African plants from those of the New World? What are the analogies in shape that link the alpine plants of the Andes with those of the high peaks toe the Pyrenees? I was the first to ask these questions — and, of course, the first to answer them.”
Do you get the significance of this?
He is the forefather of evolution, not Charles Darwin.
In 4 months, he collected 4000 plant samples, many of which were taped to notebooks, and some of which, he sketched with great care. It occurs to me that there are artists who are talented in sketching with detail to great artistic acclaim, but Humboldt had to do it out of necessity, in order to capture each tiny detail.
He deduced the ancient shifting of tectonic plates based on this.
“Others might look at the natural world through the narrow lens of classification, but I see nature as a global force — an interconnected whole I was the first to talk about global vegetation zones… well, I didn’t use that term, but I described them as long bands that slung across the globe.”
“Connections, Bonpland. Connections are everything.”
Charles Darwin had taken his work echelons further, observing animals through the lens of evolution.
But it is still worth celebrating Alexander Von Humboldt.
How brave it is to travel to unknown lands and to live amongst tribal natives in the forests, spending months learning to communicate with each other.
He went into ancient libraries and salvaged rotting government papers.
“Why are you still here? Let’s go and climb a volcano!” Bonpland said.
“No, no, these are important!”
He brought these papers home, and the book that resulted informed the King of Spain and later, Thomas Jefferson’s knowledge of the South American colonies. He did not solely care about nature, but about culture too.
It wasn’t a large scaled paid expedition. It was him and Bonpland, on an unimaginably dangerous journey.
I especially love the comics drawn of his conversations and adventures with Bonpland. In one of them, Bonpland had fallen down a ravine. Alexander Von Humboldt recollected the fall by marking the positions where Bonpland had tumbled, hit against a boulder, rolled to another position, and finally landed, creating a diagram of it.
I love Von Humboldt because he truly created an original idea. The idea of interconnectedness in nature.
“Connections, Bonpland. Connections are everything.”
Here’s one of Humboldt’s sketches.
