The Invention of Nature

Wherever Humboldt turned, there were new and exciting theories. At the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes he met naturalists Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Cuvier had turned the controversial concept of extinctions into a scientific fact by examining fossil bones and concluding that they didn’t belong to existing animals. And Lamarck had recently developed a theory of the gradual transmutation of species, paving the way for evolutionary ideas. The celebrated astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was working on ideas about the formation of the earth and the universe which helped Humboldt shape his own ideas. The savants in Paris were pushing the boundaries of scientific thought.

A hot-air balloon over Paris (Illustration Credit 9.3)

Everybody was excited about Humboldt’s safe return. It had been so long, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, that it felt as if Alexander ‘had risen from the dead’. Others proposed that Humboldt be made president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, but he had no intention of returning to Berlin. Even his family wasn’t there any more. With both his parents dead and Wilhelm now in Rome as the Prussian Minister at the Vatican, there was nothing to tempt him home.

To his great surprise Humboldt found Wilhelm’s wife, Caroline, living in Paris. Pregnant with their sixth child, she had left Rome for France in June 1804 with two of their children after their nine-year-old son had died the previous summer. The milder climate in Paris, the couple believed, would be better for the two children, who were also suffering from dangerous fevers, than the sweltering heat of Rome during the summer. Wilhelm, stuck in Rome, pressed his wife for every single detail about his brother’s return. How was he? What were his plans? Had he changed? After this adventure do people stare at him as if at a ‘fantastical creature’?

He looked really well, Caroline replied. The hardship of the expedition years had not weakened him – on the contrary, Alexander had never been healthier. The many mountain climbs had made him strong and fit, Caroline thought, and her brother-in-law seemed not to have aged during the past years. It was almost ‘as if he had only left us the day before yesterday’. His manners, gestures and countenance were just the same as before, she wrote to Wilhelm. The only difference was that he had put on some weight and that he talked even more and faster – as far as that was possible.

But neither Caroline nor Wilhelm approved of Alexander’s wish to remain in France. It was his patriotic duty to return to Berlin and to live there for a while, they said, reminding him of his ‘Deutschheit’ – his ‘Germanness’. When Wilhelm wrote that ‘one has to honour the fatherland’, Alexander chose to ignore his brother. Just before his departure for the United States, he had already written to Wilhelm from Cuba that he had no desire ever to see Berlin again. When Alexander heard that Wilhelm wanted him to move there, he only ‘pulled faces’, Caroline reported back. He was having far too much fun in Paris. ‘The fame is greater than ever before,’ Humboldt boasted to his brother.

After their arrival Bonpland had first gone to visit his family in the port town of La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, but Humboldt and Carlos Montúfar, who had accompanied them to France, had immediately travelled to Paris. Humboldt threw himself into his new life in the capital. He wanted to share the results of his expedition. Within three weeks, he was delivering a series of lectures on his explorations to packed audiences at the Académie des Sciences. He jumped so quickly from one subject to another that nobody could keep up. Humboldt ‘unites a whole Académie within him,’ a French chemist declared. As the scientists listened to his lectures, read his manuscripts and examined his collections, they were astonished at how a single man could be so familiar with so many different disciplines. Even those who had been critical about his abilities in the past were now enthusiastic, Humboldt proudly wrote to Wilhelm.

He conducted experiments, wrote about his expedition and discussed his theories with his new scientific friends. Humboldt worked so much that it seemed as if ‘night and day form one mass of time’ during which he worked, slept and ate, one American visitor in Paris noted, ‘without making any arbitrary division of it’. The only way Humboldt could keep up was by sleeping very little, and only if he had to. If he woke in the middle of the night, he got up and worked. If he was not hungry, he ignored mealtimes. If he was tired, he drank more coffee.