The Invention of Nature

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 presented 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.