The Invention of Nature

Humboldt was revolutionizing the sciences. In September 1828 he invited hundreds of scientists from across Germany and Europe to attend a conference in Berlin.¹ Unlike previous such meetings at which scientists had endlessly presented papers about their own work, Humboldt put together a very different programme. Rather than being talked at, he wanted the scientists to talk with each other. There were convivial meals and social outings such as concerts and excursions to the royal menagerie on the Pfaueninsel in Potsdam. Meetings were held among botanical, zoological and fossil collections as well as at the university and the botanical garden. Humboldt encouraged scientists to gather in small groups and across disciplines. He connected the visiting scientists on a more personal level, ensuring that they forged friendships that would foster close networks. He envisaged an interdisciplinary brotherhood of scientists who would exchange and share knowledge. ‘Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible,’ he reminded them in his opening speech.

Around 500 scientists attended the conference. It was an ‘eruption of nomadic naturalists’, Humboldt wrote to his friend Arago in Paris. Visitors arrived from Cambridge, Zurich, Florence and as far away as Russia. From Sweden, for instance, came Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry, and from England several scientists including Humboldt’s old acquaintance Charles Babbage. The brilliant mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß, who came from Göttingen and stayed for three weeks in Humboldt’s apartment, thought the congress was like pure ‘oxygen’.

Despite the frantic pace of his life, Humboldt made time to renew his friendship with Goethe. Almost eighty years old and 200 miles away in Weimar, Goethe was too frail to come to Berlin, but Humboldt visited him. Goethe was envious of his friends in Berlin who had the pleasure of seeing Humboldt regularly. The ageing poet had long followed Humboldt’s every move, often pestering mutual friends for information. In his mind, Goethe said, he had ‘always accompanied’ his old friend, and meeting Humboldt was one of the ‘brightest points’ in his life. Over the previous two decades they had corresponded regularly and Goethe thought that every letter from Humboldt was invigorating. Whenever Humboldt sent his latest publications, Goethe read them immediately, but he missed their lively discussions.

Goethe felt increasingly removed from scientific advances. Unlike Paris, he complained, where French thinkers were united in one great city, the problem in Germany was that everybody lived too far apart. With one scientist in Berlin, the next in Königsberg and yet another in Bonn, the exchange of ideas was stifled by distance. How different life would be, Goethe thought after seeing Humboldt, if they lived close together. A single day with Humboldt brought him further than years ‘on my isolated path’, Goethe said.

For all the joy of having his scientific sparring partner back, there was one subject – albeit a huge one – on which they disagreed: the creation of the earth. When Humboldt had studied at the mining academy in Freiberg, he had followed the ideas of his teacher Abraham Gottlieb Werner, who had been the main proponent of the Neptunist theory – believing that mountains and the earth’s crust had been shaped by the sedimentation deposited by a primordial ocean. But following his own observations in Latin America Humboldt had become a ‘Vulcanist’. He now believed that the earth had been formed through catastrophic events such as volcano eruptions and earthquakes.

Everything, Humboldt said, was connected below the surface. The volcanoes he had climbed in the Andes were all linked subterraneously – it was like ‘a single volcanic furnace’. Clusters and chains of volcanoes across great distances, he said, bore testimony to the fact that they were not individual local occurrences but part of a global force. His examples were as graphic as they were terrifying: in one sweeping move he connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores on 30 January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that had destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30 April 1812 – the same day when the people who lived at the Rio Apure (from where Humboldt had launched his Orinoco expedition) claimed to have heard a loud rumble deep below their feet. All these events had been part of one huge chain reaction, Humboldt said.