The Invention of Nature

Two days later parts of the tunnel fell in, and then in mid-May the riverbed above the tunnel collapsed completely, creating a huge hole through which water came gushing in. Amazingly no lives were lost and after repairs were made, the work continued. By then Humboldt had left London and had arrived in Berlin.

He was now the most famous scientist in Europe and admired by colleagues, poets and thinkers alike. One man, though, had yet to read his work. That man was eighteen-year-old Charles Darwin who, at the very moment that Humboldt was being fêted in London, had given up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Robert Darwin, Charles’s father, was furious. ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’

¹ Or in the case of isobars, the lines represent air pressure.

² During Napoleon’s reign Louis XVIII had lived in exile in Prussia, Russia and Britain.

³ Wilhelm had left London in 1818. He had then briefly held a ministerial position in Berlin but had grown frustrated with Prussia’s reactionary politics. At the end of 1819, Wilhelm had retired from his political career and moved to the family estate at Tegel, which he had inherited.

⁴ Forty-six-year-old Mary Somerville was a celebrated mathematician and polymath. In 1827 she was working on the translation of Laplace’s book The Mechanism of the Heavens into English. Her writing was so clear that the book became a bestseller in Britain. She was the only woman, Laplace said, ‘who could understand and correct his works’. Others called her the ‘queen of science’. She would later publish a book called Physical Geography which bore many similarities to Humboldt’s approach to science and the natural world.

PART IV

Influence: Spreading Ideas

15

Return to Berlin

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT arrived in Berlin on 12 May 1827. He was fifty-seven and disliked the city as much as he had two decades previously. He knew that his life would never be the same. From now on much of his day would belong to the ‘tedious, restless life at Court’. Friedrich Wilhelm III had 250 chamberlains for most of whom the title was only honorary. Humboldt, though, was expected to join the inner court circle but with no political role. He was expected to be the king’s intellectual entertainer and after-dinner reader. Humboldt survived behind a façade of smiles and chat. The man who had written thirty years previously that ‘court life robs even the most intellectual of their genius and freedom’, now found himself bound to royal routine. This was the beginning of what Humboldt called his ‘swinging of a pendulum’ – a life in which he chased the king’s movements from one castle to the next summer residence and back to Berlin, always on the road and always loaded with manuscripts and boxes full of books and notes. The only time he had for himself and to write his books was between midnight and three o’clock in the morning.

Humboldt returned to a country that had become a police state in which censorship was part of daily life. Public meetings – even scientific gatherings – were regarded with great suspicion and student bodies had been forcibly dissolved. Prussia had no constitution and no national parliament, only some provincial assemblies that had advisory functions but couldn’t make laws or impose taxes. Every decision was under close royal supervision. The whole city displayed a decidedly military character. Sentries were placed at almost all public buildings and visitors remarked on the perpetual drumming and parading of soldiers. It seemed as if there were more military men than civilians in town. One tourist noted the constant marching and ‘endless display of uniforms of all sorts, in all public places’.

With no political muscle at court, Humboldt was determined to infuse Berlin at least with a spirit of intellectual curiosity. It was badly needed. Already as a young man, when he had worked as a mining inspector, Humboldt had founded and privately financed a school for miners. Like his brother Wilhelm, who had almost single-handedly established a new Prussian education system two decades previously, Alexander believed that education was the foundation of a free and happy society. For many this was a dangerous thought. In Britain, for example, pamphlets were published, warning that knowledge exalted the poor ‘above their humble and laborious duties’.

Stadtschloss in Berlin (Illustration Credit 15.1)