The Invention of Nature

Berlin had never seen anything like it, Wilhelm von Humboldt said. As newspapers announced the lectures, people rushed to secure their seats. There were traffic jams on the days of the talks with policemen on horses trying to control the chaos. An hour before Humboldt took the podium, the auditorium was already crowded. The ‘jostle is frightful’, said Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But it was all worth it. Women, who were not permitted to study at universities or even to attend meetings of the scientific societies, were finally allowed to ‘listen to a clever word’. ‘The gentlemen might scoff as much as they like,’ she told a friend, but the experience was marvellous. Others were not so pleased about the new female audiences and sneered at their enthusiasm for the sciences. One woman was apparently so captivated by Humboldt’s remarks on Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, the director of the Singakademie wrote to Goethe, that her new-found adoration of astronomy was immediately introduced into her wardrobe. She asked her tailor to make the sleeves of her dress ‘twice the width of Sirius’.

With his gentle voice Humboldt took his audience on a journey through the heavens and deep seas, across the earth, up the highest mountains and then back to a tiny fleck of moss on a rock. He talked about poetry and astronomy but also about geology and landscape painting. Meteorology, the history of the earth, volcanoes and the distribution of plants were all part of his lectures. He roamed from fossils to the northern lights, and from magnetism to flora, fauna and the migration of the human race. The lectures were a portrait of a vivid kaleidoscope of correlations that spanned the entire universe. Or, as his sister-in-law Caroline von Humboldt described them, taken together they became Alexander’s ‘entire great Naturgemälde’.

Humboldt’s preparatory notes reveal how his mind worked, branching out from one idea to the next. He started conventionally enough, with a piece of paper on which he jotted down his thoughts in a fairly linear manner. But as he went on, new ideas came up which he squeezed on to the paper – sideways or into the margins with squiggles and lines separating his different points. The more he mulled over his lecture, the more information he added.

When the page was full, he filled up countless more small pieces of paper with his tiny handwriting, and then glued them all on to his notes. Humboldt had no qualms about tearing books apart, pulling pages from thick volumes which he also stuck on his paper with little red and blue sticky dots – a nineteenth-century version of Blu-tack. As he went along, he placed bits of paper on top of each other, some buried completely under the new layers, while others could be folded out from beneath. Questions to himself crowded the notes, along with little sketches, statistics, references and reminders. By the end the original paper was a many-layered bricolage of thoughts, numbers, quotes and notes with no apparent order to anyone other than Humboldt.

Humboldt’s lecture notes on plant geography (Illustration Credit 15.2)

Everybody was enthralled. Newspapers reported how Humboldt’s ‘new method’ of lecturing and thinking surprised the audience with the way that it connected seemingly disparate disciplines and facts. ‘The listener,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘is enchained by an irresistible power.’ This was the culmination of Humboldt’s work of the past three decades. ‘I have never heard anyone in an hour and a half give expression to so many new ideas,’ one scholar wrote to his wife. People remarked on the extraordinary clarity with which Humboldt explained this complex web of nature. Caroline von Humboldt was deeply impressed. Only Alexander, she said, could present such ‘wonderful depth’ with a lightness of touch. The lectures heralded a ‘new epoch’, a newspaper declared. When Humboldt’s German publisher, Johann Georg von Cotta, heard about the success of the first lecture, he immediately suggested paying someone to take notes that then could be published. He offered the grand sum of 5,000 thalers but Humboldt refused. He had other plans and would not be rushed.