Humboldt's Cosmos Read online

  But even the gregarious Wilhelm was unable to break through his brother’s loneliness. “Happy he will never be,” Wilhelm later wrote, “and never tranquil, because I cannot believe than any real attachment will ever steal his heart. . . . A veil hung over our innermost feelings which neither of us dared to lift.” For his part, Alexander seemed to embrace his solitude. “Isolation has much in its favor,” he later confided. “One learns thereby to search inwardly to gain self-respect without being dependent on the opinions of others.”

  Even more than to his older brother, Alexander turned for solace to the forests and fields he’d tramped over so often with their father. “Nature can be so soothing to the tormented mind,” he found, “—a blue sky, the glittering surface of lake water, the green foliage of trees, may be your solace. In such company, it is even possible to forget the reality of one’s personal existence.” Besides this transcendence, he experienced a sense of freedom in the woods, an ability to be himself, that he never felt under the sharp gaze of his mother and the tutors. It was during this period that he first sensed the great restlessness that would drive him forever after, and he spend many hours wandering the estate, exercising his considerable talent for sketching. He also collected rock, plant, and insect specimens, which he painstakingly classified, labeled, and displayed in his room in such profusion that he was mockingly known in the household as “the little apothecary.”

  Alexander grew into a good-looking young man of medium height and slight build. His eyes were blue and keen, his mouth wide and expressive. His nose was prominent and his chin strong, and his brown hair tumbled over his forehead, partially hiding the scars from a childhood bout with smallpox. By the age of sixteen, he had renounced his boyhood ambition of becoming a soldier like his father, and had determined to become a man of science. As with everything he did, he threw himself into these pursuits with a determined energy. Around this time, he carted his plant and rock specimens to the home of the renowned German botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow, for the great man’s approval and explication. Though only a few years older than Alexander, Willdenow was already renowned for his landmark book Flora of Berlin. It was from Willdenow that Alexander first heard the word botany.

  Alexander also called on the famous etcher Daniel Chodowiecki, director of the Academy of Arts, to show him his sketches. Chodowiecki was sufficiently impressed to take him on as a student, providing important technical training for a budding naturalist in that prephotographic age. Alexander attended physics lectures by Marcus Herz, and even cajoled his mother into installing a lightning rod at Tegel, the second in all of Germany (after the University of Göttingen).

  Despite her son’s obvious passion for science, his mother was determined that Alexander would study finance and prepare for a career in government. When he turned seventeen, he and Wilhelm were sent to the Academia Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, near the Polish border. Alexander took courses in law, medicine, and philosophy, none of which interested him. The school was chosen for its proximity more than its excellence, and he wrote to friends complaining of the inferior teaching: “The goddess of Knowledge has no temple here.” Wilhelm, ever the student, immersed himself in his course work, and the two brothers, once inseparable, grew apart.

  Alexander turned elsewhere for companionship. His closest friend at Frankfurt was a theology student named Wilhelm Gabriel Wegener, and over the next few years, whenever they were separated, Alexander wrote Wegener passionate letters. “Since that February 13,” went one note, “as we swore eternal brotherly love to each other, I feel that none of my other acquaintances can give me what you have for me. . . . My fervent love and sincere friendship for you are as imperishable as the soul that gives them birth.” Another proclaimed: “When I measure the longing with which I wait for news from you, I am certain that no friend could love another more than I love you. When I recall all the signs of your friendship, I feel tormented in the thought that I don’t love you as much as your sweet impressionable soul, your attachment for me, deserve.”

  These were not typical expressions of male friendship, even by the standards of eighteenth-century Europe. Indeed, Alexander himself was disturbed by such feelings, and he discovered that demanding intellectual work helped to scour them from his mind, at least temporarily. As he wrote Wegener, “Serious themes, and especially the study of nature, become barriers against sensuality.” The following year, Alexander returned to Berlin, and the two boys gradually fell out of touch.

  Several years later, Humboldt formed another intense attachment, this time to a young army officer named Reinhard von Haeften. In one letter to “my dearly beloved Reinhard,” Humboldt professed, “I know that I only live through you, my good precious Reinhard, and that I can only be happy in your presence.” Later, when von Haeften married, Humboldt wrote him in despair over the cooling of their friendship:

  Two years have passed since we met, since your fate became mine. . . . I felt better in your company, and from that moment I was tied to you as by iron chains. Even if you must refuse me, treat me coldly with disdain, I should still want to be with you. . . . Never would I cease to remain attached to you, and I can thank heaven that I was granted before my death the grand experience of knowing how much two human beings can mean to each other. With each day my love and attachment for you increase. For two years I have known no other bliss on earth but your gaiety, your company, and the slightest expression of your contentment. My love for you is not just friendship, or brotherly love—it is veneration, childlike gratefulness, and devotion to your will is my most exalted law.

  For Humboldt, the attachments to Wegener and von Haeften were the beginning of a lifelong pattern of infatuation with and subsequent estrangement from other men. And thus was Wilhelm’s prediction, that no permanent attachment would ever steal his brother’s heart, confirmed—though perhaps not in exactly the way he’d meant.

  Science would become Alexander’s lifetime passion instead. Burdened with an insatiable curiosity—about history, art, and language, as well as physics, geology, and botany—he was always working, never able to sit still. Restless was the word that family, friends, and acquaintances applied to him time and again. As he himself wrote, “I am anxious, agitated, unable to enjoy anything I have finished, and never content except when undertaking something new and doing three things at the same time.” With the condescension of an older brother, Wilhelm put it more pithily: “Alexander maintains a horror of the single fact. He tries to take in everything.”

  Alexander didn’t always wear his learning lightly, and his bustling preoccupation was sometimes seen as self-absorption. In 1797, two years before Humboldt left for Latin America, the great German poet and dramatist Johann Schiller wrote of his young friend, “I am afraid that despite all his talents and restless activity he will never contribute much that is important for science. There is a little too much vanity in all his doings. . . .” And Wilhelm had written to his wife, Caroline, “[Alexander’s] is a lovable nature, yet he maintains very peculiar ideas for which I really don’t care. . . . He is a busybody, full of enterprise that to others necessarily must seem like vanity. He peddles the wares of his knowledge with much ado, as if he desperately needed either to dazzle people or to beg for their sympathy. . . . All this wanting to impress others really stems from a desire to impress oneself.”

  In spring of the monumental year 1789, Alexander was enrolled as a law student at Göttingen, which he entered after a year in Berlin brushing up on his Greek and studying industrial processes as part of his training in economics. As the premier university in Germany, Göttingen was also the center of German scientific scholarship. Here, free from the backwater of Frankfurt an der Oder and immersed in the intellectual mainstream at last, Alexander found ample opportunity to pursue his scientific interests in addition to his set courses. It was also here that he was exposed to the writings of Kant, whose ideas had taken hold at the university. In fact, in later life Humboldt credited his time at Göttingen as
the most influential period of his education. At the university he threw himself into his studies and did so well that he was accepted into the prestigious Philosophical Society, through which he met some of Europe’s greatest naturalists. There were also lectures on anthropology, anatomy, art, and mythology. But even in this stimulating new environment, he wasn’t able to escape completely the fits of melancholy and ill health he’d suffered throughout his youth.

  The son-in-law of one of Alexander’s professors at Göttingen happened to be Georg Forster, who as a teenager had accompanied his father on Cook’s second voyage around the world. The younger Forster was now a best-selling author in his own right, and his books, such as the 1777 work A Voyage Round the World, were, like his father’s writing, a highly readable mixture of scientific observation and travelogue. (In fact, it has been noted that Humboldt’s Personal Narrative owes a serious stylistic debt to Forster’s work.) Forster was now planning a trip across Europe to London, to search for a publisher for his next project and to try to straighten out some difficulties in his deceased father’s affairs. For Alexander, who managed to invite himself along, his first journey across Europe would be a turning point in his life. In fact, in many ways, it was that journey that had set him on course for his great trek through Latin America.

  In the spring of 1790, Forster and Alexander started down the Rhine, stopping at Cologne to admire the cathedral. From there they continued to Belgium, then, despite the revolution raging in France, went on to Dunkerque, where Alexander had his first, intoxicating glimpse of the sea. Hiking across Flanders, they narrowly skirted the French army, then arrived in Lille just in time to witness the rebellion against the monarchy. In London, they toured Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament and paid a call on Sir Joseph Banks, the brilliant naturalist of Cook’s first voyage, then continued across the island to Lancashire. During the journey, Alexander impressed Forster with his powers of observation and his endless drive. The great man was so taken with Humboldt’s comments on Cologne Cathedral, in fact, that he later included them in his book Sketches of the Lower Rhine.

  But the long journey also took its toll on Alexander’s already tenuous health. Brimming with a nervous energy, determined to inspect every cavern and mine, tour every manufactory and monument, he exhausted himself. Forster, in whom he confided, attributed the young man’s frailty to an “overexertion of the mind” caused by “certain people in Berlin” who were forcing him into a career he didn’t want. Whatever the cause of Alexander’s chronic illnesses, they certainly didn’t bode well for a future of scientific exploration.

  In July, Alexander and Forster recrossed the Channel and arrived in Paris, which was seething with revolutionary zeal. Forster longed to stay and throw himself into the battle for the rights of man. Alexander was also moved by the suffering of the people but abhorred the violence of the mob. Besides, there was no question of his remaining in France. In the autumn, his mother expected him to matriculate in the Hamburg School of Commerce.

  The traveling companions returned to Mainz, on the Rhine, and said their farewells. Later, in 1792, the French occupied the city, and Forster became a member of the provisional government. But in 1795, while he was in Paris on official business, Mainz was recaptured by Prussian and Austrian troops, and Forster was denounced in Germany as a traitor. Unable to return home, he died in Paris that year, deeply disillusioned.

  Alexander never saw the charming, imprudent Forster again, but he still felt indebted to his mentor. For during their months together, he had had the first, hazy glimpse of his future life. For one thing, he was deeply impressed by his direct experience of the French Revolution, which in those days before the descent into the Terror was greeted as proof of human progress and perfectibility; for the rest of his life, Humboldt would remain a staunch republican and an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and neglected.

  In addition, as he listened night after night to the circumnavigator’s adventures, Alexander was seized with a passion for everything having to do with the sea, and he burned with the Romantic’s ambition to visit tropical lands. It was during this journey with Forster, Humboldt wrote in the Personal Narrative, that he determined to undertake a voyage of discovery to the New Continent—the journey that would be the pivotal event of his life and the basis of his international celebrity. Yet his mother had other ideas, and it was an ambition he doubted he could ever realize during her lifetime. Reluctantly, he returned to Berlin and prepared to take up his studies in business and political economy.

  However, in those few weeks before leaving for Hamburg, it appears that Alexander also embarked on a very different course, intended to subvert his mother’s plans for him. Seemingly without her knowledge, he applied for admission to the famous Bergakademie in the old silver-mining town of Freiberg, in Saxony. Founded in 1765 to provide practical training in assaying, engineering, and mineral science, the Mining Academy had developed into one of the premier schools of mineralogy in Europe. As such, it was an ideal training ground for a would-be scientific explorer.

  Alexander made his application directly to the academy’s director, Abraham Gottlob Werner, the premier geologist of the time and one of the principal founders of the science. Developing a whole new system of mineral identification based on color, hardness, texture, smell, and taste, Werner had provided a practical means of identifying minerals in the field and had brought order to a previously chaotic study. It was Werner’s system that Humboldt would employ in Latin America and throughout his publications.

  Werner had also developed a major theory of the earth’s history. Before, although a good deal was known about minerals and rock formations, there was no generally accepted theory of the earth’s processes. Most literate Europeans, in fact, still subscribed to the view that the earth was only six thousand years old, based on highly speculative calculations made from biblical sources. Although erosion had long been recognized as the process by which landforms were broken down, it was Werner, drawing on the earlier, theologically inspired Flood theory of John Woodward, who had put forward the leading explanation of how they had been built up. Known as neptunism, this Bible-compatible theory held that all minerals had precipitated out of a vast primordial ocean that had once covered the entire planet. As the ocean had receded, the landforms had been exposed. Since the earth had no molten core under this view, volcanoes were said to be caused by fires smoldering in underground coal beds, and lava was simply thought to be sedimentary rock that had been melted by these fires, then ejected.

  For decades, neptunism had been geology’s reigning paradigm. But in recent years, Werner’s ideas had been challenged by the controversial Scots geologist James Hutton. Drawing on earlier ideas of Anton Moro, the amateur Hutton was advancing a radical new vision of the earth as a dynamic, self-regulating system that must have been at work far longer than the biblical span of six thousand years, and that, in Hutton’s famous phrase, showed “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.” This theory, called vulcanism or plutonism, suggested that landforms were actually created by molten rock oozing from deep within the planet. Its fundamental principle, uniformitarianism, held, with startling simplicity, that the same geologic processes that formed the earth were still at work and still observable. As a Deist, Hutton believed that the universe functioned according to its own unchanging laws, without additional intervention by a supreme being. Landforms hadn’t been sedimented out of a primordial ocean in a one-time act of creation but had been thrust up, and were still being thrust up, as a result of heat deep within the earth’s core—in the same process seen in volcanoes. Although some rocks were undoubtedly formed by sedimentation, even there the earth’s internal heat provided the energy to fuse the sediment into stone.

  At the time Humboldt applied to the Mining Academy, the neptunist/vulcanist debate was still raging, and he was leaning toward the Werner camp. He apparently wasn’t swayed by the religious argument for the neptunist theory, but Werner enjoyed tremendous pr
estige and personal charisma, and it was hard to refute such authority. Humboldt had previously published a paper defending the neptunist point of view, and, hoping to make a good impression, he now enclosed a copy along with his application to the Bergakademie.

  But, always a reluctant correspondent and now overburdened with teaching and administrative duties, Werner by that point had stopped opening his mail. Not to be put off, Humboldt wrote again, but still there was no answer. Approaching the end of his studies at Hamburg, Humboldt was growing increasingly anxious over his future. So in spring 1791, he went over Werner’s head and applied directly to Herr Heinitz, minister of industry and mines and founder of the Mining Academy. Would it be possible, he wanted to know, to attend the academy for an abbreviated period, then take up a position in the ministry? Heinitz was impressed with the application, and his acceptance came at the end of May. Frau Humboldt approved the plan, with its promise of a civil service position, not realizing that the Mining Academy was only a step toward Humboldt’s ultimate, unspoken goal of scientific exploration.