The Invention of Nature

18

Humboldt’s Cosmos

‘THE MAD FRENZY has seized me of representing in a single work the whole material world,’ Humboldt declared in October 1834. He wanted to write a book that would bring together everything in the heavens and on earth, ranging from distant nebulae to the geography of mosses, and from landscape painting to the migration of the human races and poetry. Such a ‘book on Nature’, he wrote, ‘ought to produce an impression like Nature herself’.

At the age of sixty-five, Humboldt began what would become his most influential book: Cosmos. A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. It was loosely based on his Berlin lecture series, but the expedition to Russia had given him the final comparative data he had needed. A colossal endeavour, Cosmos was like a ‘sword in the breast that now has to be drawn’, he said, and the ‘opus of my life’. The title, Humboldt explained, came from the Greek word κόσμος – Kosmos – which meant ‘beauty’ and ‘order’, and which had also been applied to the universe as an ordered system. Humboldt now used it, as he said, as a catchphrase to express and encapsulate ‘both heaven and earth’.

And so, in 1834, the very year that the term ‘scientist’¹ was first coined, heralding the beginning of the professionalization of the sciences and the hardening lines between different scientific disciplines, Humboldt began a book that did exactly the opposite. As science moved away from nature into laboratories and universities, separating itself off into distinct disciplines, Humboldt created a work that brought together all that professional science was trying to keep apart.

Because Cosmos covered a vast range of subjects, Humboldt’s research rippled into all conceivable areas. Aware that he didn’t and couldn’t know everything, Humboldt recruited an army of helpers – scientists, classicists and historians – who were all experts in their fields. Well-travelled British botanists happily sent him long lists of plants from the countries they had visited. Astronomers handed over their data, geologists provided maps and classicists consulted ancient texts for Humboldt. His old contacts in France proved useful too. A French explorer obliged by sending Humboldt a long manuscript about Polynesian plants, for example, while close friends from Paris such as François Arago were at Humboldt’s regular disposal. At times Humboldt asked specific questions or enquired which pages he should consult in which book, and at others he sent out long questionnaires. When chapters were completed, he would distribute proof pages with gaps that he requested his correspondents to fill in with the relevant numbers and facts, or he would ask them to correct his drafts.

Humboldt was in charge of the general overview, while his helpers provided the specific data and information he needed. He had the cosmic perspective and they were the tools in his grand scheme. Intensely meticulous about accuracy, Humboldt always consulted several experts about each subject. His thirst for facts was insatiable – from questioning a missionary in China about the Chinese dislike of dairy products to querying another correspondent about the number of palm species in Nepal. It was his obsession, he admitted, ‘to pursue one and the same object until I can explain it’. He dispatched thousands of letters and questioned visitors. A young novelist who had recently returned from Algiers, for example, was terrified when Humboldt bombarded him with enquiries about rocks, plants and strata of which he knew absolutely nothing. Humboldt could be relentless. ‘This time you won’t escape,’ he told another visitor, for ‘I have to plunder you.’

As his contacts responded, waves of knowledge and data rolled towards Berlin. Each month new material arrived that had to be read, understood, sorted and integrated. The work expanded as Humboldt went along. With the ever increasing flood of knowledge, he explained to his publisher, ‘the material grows under my hands’. Cosmos was ‘a kind of impossible enterprise’, Humboldt admitted.

The only way to handle all this data was to be perfectly organized about the research. Humboldt collected his material in boxes which were divided by envelopes into different subjects. Whenever he received a letter, he cut out the important information and placed it in the relevant envelope together with any other scraps of material that might be useful – newspaper cuttings, pages from books, pieces of paper on which he scribbled a few numbers, a quotation or a little drawing. In one such box, for example, which was filled with material related to geology, Humboldt kept tables of mountain heights, maps, lecture notes, remarks from his old acquaintance Charles Lyell, a map of Russia by another British geologist, as well as engravings of fossils and information from classicists on geology from ancient Greece. The advantage of this system was that he could collect materials for years, and when it came to writing, all he needed was to grab the relevant box or the envelope. As untidy as he was in his study or chaotic about his finances, when it came to his research Humboldt was unremittingly exact.

Sometimes he scribbled ‘very important’ on a particular note or ‘important, to follow up in Cosmos’. At other times he glued pieces of paper with his own thoughts on to a letter, or tore out a page from a relevant book. One box might contain newspaper articles, a dried piece of moss and a list of plants from the Himalaya. Other boxes included an envelope evocatively entitled ‘Luftmeer’ – air ocean, which was Humboldt’s beautiful term for the atmosphere – as well as materials on antiquity, long tables of temperatures, and a page with citations about crocodiles and elephants found in Hebrew poetry. There were boxes on slavery, meteorology, astronomy and botany among many others. No one but Humboldt, a fellow scientist claimed, could so dexterously tie together so many ‘loose ends’ of scientific research into one great knot.

Usually Humboldt was gracious about the assistance he received, but once in a while he let his famously malicious tongue rule. Johann Franz Encke, the director of the observatory in Berlin, for example, was treated rather unfairly. Encke worked particularly hard, spending many weeks collecting astronomical data for Cosmos. In return, though, Humboldt told a colleague that Encke ‘had become frozen like a glacier in his mother’s womb’. Nor did Humboldt spare his brother the occasional barb. When Wilhelm tried to help his brother’s precarious financial situation by suggesting him as the director of a new museum in Berlin, Alexander was outraged. The position was below his standing and reputation, Alexander told his brother, and he had certainly not left Paris to become the director of a mere ‘picture gallery’.

Humboldt had become used to admiration and flattery. The many young men who gathered around him formed something like his own ‘royal court’, one of the Berlin University professors noted. When Humboldt entered a room it was as if everything was recalibrated and the centre changed – ‘all turned to him’. In silent reverence, these young men listened to Humboldt’s every syllable. He was the greatest attraction Berlin had to offer and he took it for granted that he was the focus of attention. No one was ever able to interject a single word when Humboldt spoke, one German writer complained. His penchant for talking incessantly had become so legendary that the French writer Honoré de Balzac immortalized Humboldt in a comical sketch that featured a brain stored in a jar from which people extracted ideas, and a ‘certain Prussian savant known for the unfailing fluidity of his speech’.

One young pianist who had considered an invitation to play for Humboldt a great honour quickly discovered that the old man could be very rude (and that he had no interest in music whatsoever). As the pianist began to play, there was a moment of silence but then Humboldt continued to talk so loudly that no one could listen to the music. He was lecturing the audience as he always did and as the pianist played his crescendos and fortes, Humboldt raised his voice in tandem, always outdoing the music. ‘It was a duet,’ the pianist said, ‘which I did not sustain long.’

Humboldt remained an enigma for many. On the one hand he could be haughty, but at the same time he humbly admitted that he needed to learn more. The students at the University of Berlin were astounded to see the old man shuffle into the auditorium with his folder tucked under his arm – not to present a lecture but to listen to one of the young professors. Humboldt attended lectures on Greek literature to catch up on what he had missed during his own education, he said. As he was writing Cosmos, he followed the latest scientific developments by watching the experiments conducted by a chemistry professor and by listening to geologist Carl Ritter’s lectures. Quietly, always sitting in the fourth or fifth row of the auditorium, near the window, Humboldt took notes just like the young students next to him. No matter how bad the weather was, the old man always came. Humboldt was only absent when the king requested his presence, leaving the students to tease that ‘Alexander is skipping lectures today because he’s having tea with the king.’

The university in Berlin which Wilhelm von Humboldt had founded in 1810 and where Alexander von Humboldt attended lectures (Illustration Credit 18.1)

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’. One of the main consolations of his life there was Wilhelm. Over the past years the two brothers had become close, spending as much time together as possible. After Caroline’s death in spring 1829, Wilhelm had withdrawn to Tegel, but Alexander had visited whenever he could. Only two years older than Alexander, Wilhelm was ageing fast. He seemed older than sixty-seven, and had grown increasingly weaker. He was blind in one eye, his hands shook so badly that he couldn’t write any more and his painfully thin body stooped. Then, in late March 1835, Wilhelm caught a fever after visiting Caroline’s grave in Tegel’s park. Alexander spent the next days at his brother’s bedside. They talked about death and Wilhelm’s wish to be buried next to Caroline. On 3 April Alexander read one of Friedrich Schiller’s poems to his brother. Five days later, Wilhelm died with Alexander at his side.

Bereft, Humboldt felt lonely and abandoned. ‘I never had believed that these old eyes had so many tears left,’ he wrote to an old friend. With Wilhelm’s death, he had lost his family and, as he said, ‘half of myself’. One line in a letter to his French publisher summed up his feelings: ‘Pity me; I am the unhappiest of men.’

Humboldt felt miserable in Berlin. ‘Everything is bleak around me, so bleak,’ he wrote a year after Wilhelm’s death. Luckily one of the employment conditions that he had negotiated with the king allowed Humboldt to travel to Paris every year for a few months in order to collect the latest research for Cosmos. The thought of Paris was the only thing that cheered him up, he admitted.

In Paris, he easily fell back into his rhythm of intense work, networking and evening entertainments. After an early breakfast of black coffee – ‘concentrated sunshine’, as Humboldt called it – he worked all day and in the evening went on his usual tour of salons until 2 a.m. He visited scientists across town – prodding and poking to learn about their latest discoveries. As much as Paris stimulated him, he always dreaded his return to Berlin, that ‘dancing carnivalesque necropolis’. Each visit to Paris expanded Humboldt’s international network and each return to Berlin was accompanied by trunks filled with new material that needed to be incorporated into Cosmos. But with each discovery, new measurement or bit of data, the publication of Cosmos was delayed yet again.

It didn’t help that in Berlin Humboldt had to juggle his scientific life with his court duties. His financial situation remained difficult and he needed his chamberlain salary. He was required to follow the king’s every move from one castle to another. The king’s favourite palace was Sanssouci in Potsdam about twenty miles from Humboldt’s apartment in Berlin. For Humboldt it meant travelling with the twenty to thirty boxes of material that he needed to write Cosmos – his ‘mobile resources’, as he called them. Some days it seemed he spent more time on the road than anywhere else: ‘yesterday Pfaueninsel, tea at Charlottenburg, comedy and dinner at Sanssouci, today Berlin, tomorrow to Potsdam’ was not an unusual routine. Humboldt felt like a planet moving along its orbital path, always in motion, never stopping.

His court obligations took up too much of his time. He had to join the king for meals and had to read to him, while his evenings were filled with the king’s private correspondence. When Friedrich Wilhelm III died in June 1840, his son and successor Friedrich Wilhelm IV demanded even more time from his chamberlain. The new king called him affectionately ‘my best Alexandros’ and used him as his ‘dictionary’, as a visitor at court observed, because Humboldt was always at hand to answer questions on topics as varied as the different heights of mountains, the history of Egypt or the geography of Africa. He furnished the king with notes on the size of the biggest diamonds ever found, the time difference between Paris and Berlin (44 minutes), dates of important reigns and the salary of Turkish soldiers. He also advised the king on what to buy for the royal collections and library as well as suggesting explorations to be funded – often appealing to his royal master’s competitive spirit, reminding him not to be outdone by other countries.

Subtly, Humboldt also attempted to exert some influence – ‘as much as I can, but like an atmosphere’ – although the king was interested neither in social reforms nor European politics. Prussia was going backwards, Humboldt said, much like William Parry, the British explorer who had believed that he was marching towards the North Pole when in reality he was drifting away from it on the moving ice.

Most evenings it was midnight before Humboldt arrived at his small flat in Oranienburger Straße which was a little less than a mile north of the king’s city palace, the Stadtschloss. Even here, though, he didn’t get the peace he needed. Visitors were constantly ringing the bell, Humboldt complained, almost as if his flat were a ‘liquor store’. To get any writing done, he had to work through half the night. ‘I don’t go to bed before 2.30am,’ Humboldt assured his publisher who had begun to doubt that Cosmos would ever be finished. Again and again Humboldt postponed the publication because he constantly found new material that he wanted to include.

In March 1841, more than six years after he had first declared his intention to publish Cosmos, Humboldt promised – but once again failed – to send the manuscript for the first volume. He jokingly warned his publisher of the danger of getting ‘involved with people who are half fossilised’, but he would not be rushed. Cosmos was too important, he insisted, his ‘most scrupulous work’.

Once in a while, when Humboldt became too frustrated, he left his manuscripts and books unopened on his desk and drove the two miles to the new observatory which he had helped to establish after his return to Berlin. As he peered through the large telescope into the night sky, the universe unfolded – here was his cosmos in all its glory. He saw the dark craters on the moon, colourful double stars that seemed to flash their light at him and distant nebulae scattered across the vault of heaven. This new telescope brought Saturn closer than he had ever seen it, the rings looking as if someone had painted them. These snatched moments of intense beauty, he told his publisher, inspired him to continue.

During those years when he was writing the first volume of Cosmos, Humboldt went to Paris several times, but in 1842 he also accompanied Friedrich Wilhelm IV to England for the christening of the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) at Windsor Castle. The visit was a rushed affair of less than two weeks, Humboldt complained, with little time for scientific matters. He couldn’t even squeeze in a visit to the observatory in Greenwich nor to the botanic garden at Kew, but he did manage to meet Charles Darwin.

Humboldt had asked the geologist Roderick Murchison, an old acquaintance from Paris, to organize a gathering. Murchison was happy to oblige, even though it was the hunting season and he would be ‘losing the best shooting of the year’. The date was set for 29 January. Nervous and excited about being introduced to Humboldt, Darwin left home early that morning, rushing to Murchison’s house in Belgrave Square, just a few hundred yards behind Buckingham Palace in London. Darwin had so much to ask and discuss. He was working on his evolutionary theory and was still thinking about plant distribution and species migration.

In the past Humboldt had used his ideas about plant distribution to discuss the possible connection between Africa and South America but he had also talked of barriers, such as deserts or mountain ranges, that stopped the movement of plants. He had written about tropical bamboo that had been found ‘buried in the ice-covered lands in the north’, arguing that the planet had changed and so too had plant distribution.

When thirty-two-year-old Darwin arrived at Murchison’s house, he saw an old man with a mop of silver-grey hair, dressed as he had been during his Russia expedition in a dark tailcoat and a white necktie. This was his ‘cosmopolitan outfit’, as Humboldt called it, because it was suitable for all occasions whether he met kings or students. At seventy-two, Humboldt’s walking had become more careful and slower, but he still knew how to work a room. When he arrived at a party or gathering, he usually shuffled through the room, his head slightly tilted and nodding to the left and right as he passed the others. Throughout this opening sequence, Humboldt’s flow of words did not stop once. From the moment he entered a room, everybody else fell silent. Any comment made by someone else only inspired Humboldt to make yet another long philosophical excursion.

Darwin was stunned. Several times he tried to get in a word but eventually gave up. Humboldt was cheerful enough and paid him ‘some tremendous compliments’ but the old man just talked too much. Humboldt gushed on for three long hours, chattering away ‘beyond all reason’, Darwin said. This was not how he had envisaged their first encounter. After all those years of worshipping Humboldt, and of admiring his books, Darwin felt a little deflated. ‘But my anticipations probably were too high,’ he later admitted.

Humboldt’s endless monologue made it impossible for Darwin to have a meaningful conversation with him. As Humboldt’s lecture continued, Darwin’s thoughts drifted in and out. Then he suddenly heard Humboldt talking about a river in Siberia where the vegetation on the opposite banks was ‘widely different’ despite the same soil and climate. Darwin’s interest was piqued. The plants on one side of the river were predominantly Asian and on the other European, Humboldt reported. Darwin caught just enough to be intrigued but had missed much of the detail in Humboldt’s barrage of words – yet he didn’t dare interrupt. Back at home, Darwin immediately scribbled everything he could remember in his notebook. But he was unsure if he had understood the older scientist correctly: ‘have two Floras marched from opposite sides & met here?? – strange case,’ Darwin wrote.

Darwin was thinking and collecting material for his ‘species theory’. Seen from the outside, Darwin’s life ran like ‘Clockwork’, as he said, built around a routine of work, meals and family time. He had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839, a little more than two years after his return from the Beagle voyage, and they now lived with their two young children in London.² In his mind, though, Darwin was engaged with the most revolutionary thoughts. He was also often ill, suffering from headaches, abdominal pain, fatigue and inflammation of his face, but he still produced essays and books, all the while deliberating about evolution.

Most of the arguments he would present years later in his Origin of Species had already crystallized, but the meticulous Darwin was not rushing to publish anything that was not solidly argued and underpinned with facts. Just as he had written a list of the pros and cons of marriage before proposing to Emma, so he would bring together everything related to his theory of evolution before presenting it to the world.

If the two men had talked properly that day, perhaps Humboldt would have discussed his ideas of a world governed not by balance and stability but by dynamic change – thoughts that he would soon introduce in the first volume of Cosmos. A species was a part of the whole, linked both to the past and future, Humboldt would write, more mutable than ‘fixed’. In Cosmos he would also discuss the missing links and the ‘intermediate steps’ that could be found in the fossil records. He would write about ‘cyclical change’, transitions and constant renewal. In short, Humboldt’s nature was in flux. All these ideas were precursors to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Humboldt was, as scientists later said, a ‘pre-Darwinian Darwinist’.³

As it was, Darwin never talked with Humboldt about these ideas, but the story about the river in Siberia continued to occupy him. Then, in January 1845, three years after Humboldt’s visit to London, Darwin’s close friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, went to Paris. Knowing that Humboldt was also in Paris on one of his research trips, Darwin used the opportunity to ask Hooker to enquire further about the conundrum of the flora at the Siberian river. He insisted that Hooker first remind Humboldt that Darwin’s whole life had been shaped by his Personal Narrative. With the flattery out of the way, Darwin instructed Hooker then to ask Humboldt ‘about the river in NE Europe, with the Flora very different on its opposite banks’.

Hooker booked himself into the same hotel as Humboldt, the Hôtel de Londres in Saint-Germain. As always Humboldt was happy to assist, but it also helped that Hooker furnished him with information about Antarctica. A little more than a year previously, Hooker had returned from a four-year voyage that was part of the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’. He had joined Captain James Clark Ross’s search for the magnetic South Pole – an expedition which was the British response to Humboldt’s call for a global network of observation points.

Like Darwin, the twenty-seven-year-old Hooker had turned Humboldt into a hero of almost mythical proportions in his mind. When he met the seventy-five-year-old in Paris, Hooker was at first disappointed. ‘To my horror,’ Hooker said, he saw a ‘punchy little German’ instead of the dashing six-foot-tall explorer he had imagined. Hooker’s reaction was typical. Many others assumed that the legendary German would be more imposing and ‘Jupiter-like’. Humboldt had never been particularly tall and broad, but as he grew older he stooped and had become even thinner. To Hooker it seemed impossible that this small withered man had ever climbed Chimborazo, but he quickly recovered and was soon charmed by the older scientist.

They talked about mutual friends in Britain and about Darwin. Hooker was amused by Humboldt’s habit of quoting himself and his books, but was impressed by how sharp he still was. His memory and ‘capability for generalising’, he said, were ‘quite marvellous’. Hooker only wished that Darwin had joined him because together they would have been able to answer all Humboldt’s questions. Of course Humboldt talked without interruption as always, Hooker reported to Darwin, but ‘his mind was still vigorous’. Nothing proved this more than his response to Darwin’s query about the river in Siberia. It was the Obi, Hooker reported, the river that Humboldt had crossed in order to reach Barnaul after racing through the anthrax-infested steppe in Russia. Humboldt told Hooker everything he knew about the distribution of Siberian plants, even though more than fifteen years had passed since the Russian expedition. ‘I do not suppose that he drew breath for 20 minutes,’ Hooker wrote to Darwin.

Then, to Hooker’s amazement, Humboldt showed him the proofs of the first volume of Cosmos. Hooker couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Like everybody else in the scientific world Hooker ‘had given Kosmos up’, because it had taken Humboldt more than a decade to complete the first volume. Knowing that Darwin would be equally excited about the news, Hooker immediately informed his friend.

Two months later, at the end of April 1845, the first volume was finally published in Germany. The wait had been worth it. Cosmos became an instant bestseller with more than 20,000 copies of the German edition sold in the first couple of months. Within a few weeks Humboldt’s publisher was reprinting and over the next few years translations – his ‘non-German Cosmos children’, as Humboldt called them – were issued in English, Dutch, Italian, French, Danish, Polish, Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian.

Cosmos was unlike any previous book about nature. Humboldt took his readers on a journey from outer space to earth, and then from the surface of the planet into its inner core. He discussed comets, the Milky Way and the solar system as well as terrestrial magnetism, volcanoes and the snow line of mountains. He wrote about the migration of the human species, about plants and animals and the microscopic organisms that live in stagnant water or on the weathered surface of rocks. Where others insisted that nature was stripped of its magic as humankind penetrated into its deepest secrets, Humboldt believed exactly the opposite. How could this be, Humboldt asked, in a world in which the coloured rays of an aurora ‘unite in a quivering sea flame’, creating a sight so otherworldly ‘the splendour of which no description can reach’? Knowledge, he said, could never ‘kill the creative force of imagination’ – instead it brought excitement, astonishment and wondrousness.

The most important part of Cosmos was the long introduction of almost one hundred pages. Here Humboldt spelled out his vision – of a world that pulsated with life. Everything was part of this ‘never-ending activity of the animated forces’, Humboldt wrote. Nature was a ‘living whole’ where organisms were bound together in a ‘net-like intricate fabric’.

The rest of the book was composed of three parts: the first on celestial phenomena; the second on the earth which included geomagnetism, oceans, earthquakes, meteorology and geography; and the third on organic life which encompassed plants, animals and humans. Cosmos was an exploration of the ‘wide range of creation’, bringing together a far greater range of subjects than any previous book. But it was more than just a collection of facts and knowledge, such as Diderot’s famous Encyclopédie, for instance, because Humboldt was most interested in connections. Humboldt’s discussion of climate was just one example that revealed how different his approach was. Where other scientists focused only on meteorological data such as temperature and weather, Humboldt was the first to understand climate as a system of complex correlations between the atmosphere, oceans and landmasses. In Cosmos he wrote of the ‘perpetual interrelationship’ between air, winds, ocean currents, elevation and the density of plant cover on land.

The breadth was incomparable to any other publication. And amazingly, Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word ‘God’. Yes, Humboldt’s nature was ‘animated by one breath – from pole to pole, one life is poured on rocks, plants, animals, and even into the swelling breast of man’, but that breath came from the earth itself, and was not instigated by any divine agency. To those who knew him this was no surprise, because Humboldt had never been devout; quite the opposite. Throughout his life, he had highlighted the terrible consequences of religious fanaticism. He had criticized missionaries in South America, as well as the Church in Prussia. Instead of God, Humboldt spoke of a ‘wonderful web of organic life’.⁴

The world was electrified. ‘Were the republic of letters to alter its constitution,’ one reviewer of Cosmos wrote, ‘and choose a sovereign, the intellectual sceptre would be offered to Alexander von Humboldt.’ In the history of publishing, the book’s popularity was ‘epoch making’, Humboldt’s German publisher announced. He had never seen so many orders – not even when Goethe had published his masterpiece Faust.

Students read Cosmos, as did scientists, artists and politicians. Prince von Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor of State, who had so disagreed with Humboldt about reforms and revolutions, now brushed politics aside and enthused that only Humboldt was capable of such great work. Poets admired it, as did musicians, with the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz declaring Humboldt a ‘dazzling’ writer. The book was so popular among musicians, Berlioz said, that he knew one who had ‘read, re-read, pondered and understood’ Cosmos during his breaks at opera performances when his colleagues played on.

In England Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, requested a copy, while Darwin professed himself impatient for the English translation. Within weeks of the book’s publication in Germany and France, a pirated English language edition had begun to circulate – translated in such execrable prose that Humboldt worried it might ‘severely damage’ his reputation in Britain. His ‘poor Cosmos’ had been butchered and was unreadable in this version.

When Hooker got hold of a copy, he offered it to Darwin. ‘Are you really sure you can spare Cosmos’, Darwin wrote to Hooker in September 1845, ‘I am very anxious to read it.’ Less than two weeks later he had studied it but it was the pirated copy. Darwin despaired about the ‘wretched English’, but was still impressed as it was ‘an exact expression of ones own thoughts’, and was keen to discuss Cosmos with Hooker. He told Charles Lyell that he was astonished by the ‘vigour & information’. Some parts were a little disappointing, Darwin thought, because they just seemed repetitions from Personal Narrative, but others were ‘admirable’. He was also flattered that Humboldt had mentioned his Voyage of the Beagle. A year later, when an authorized translation of Cosmos was published by John Murray, Darwin rushed out and bought it.

Despite the huge success, Humboldt remained insecure. He never forgot a bad review – and as before when Personal Narrative had been published it was the conservative British Quarterly Review that was critical. Hooker told Darwin that Humboldt was ‘very wroth at the Quarterly Review Article upon Cosmos’. When the second volume was published two years later, in 1847, Humboldt became so concerned about its reception that he begged his publisher to be honest with him. There was no reason to worry. People fought ‘real battles’ for copies, Humboldt’s publisher wrote, and their offices were ‘downright looted’. Bribes were offered and parcels of books destined for booksellers in St Petersburg and London were intercepted and diverted by agents intent on supplying their desperate customers in Hamburg and Vienna.

In the second volume Humboldt took his readers on a voyage of the mind, through human history from ancient civilizations to modern times. No scientific publication had ever attempted anything similar. No scientist had written about poetry, art and gardens, and about agriculture and politics, as well as about feelings and emotions. The second volume of Cosmos was a history of ‘poetic descriptions of nature’ and landscape painting through the ages from the Greeks and Persians to modern literature and art. It was also a history of science, discovery and exploration, covering everything from Alexander the Great to the Arabic world, from Christopher Columbus to Isaac Newton.

Where the first volume had looked at the external world, the second focused on an inner world – on the impressions that the external world ‘produces on the feelings’, as Humboldt explained. In homage to his old friend Goethe, who had died in 1832, and to their early friendship in Jena when the older poet had equipped him with ‘new organs’ through which to view the natural world, Humboldt underlined the importance of the senses in Cosmos. The eye, Humboldt wrote, was the organ of ‘Weltanschauung’, the organ through which we view the world but also through which we interpret, understand and define it. At a time when imagination had been firmly excluded from the sciences, Humboldt insisted that nature couldn’t be understood in any other way. One look at the heavens, Humboldt said, was all it took: the brilliant stars ‘delight the senses and inspire the mind’, yet at the same time they move along a path of mathematical precision.

The first two volumes of Cosmos proved so popular that within four years three competing English editions had been published. There was ‘sheer madness about Cosmos in England’, Humboldt reported to his German publisher, and a ‘war’ was raging between the various translators. By 1849, some 40,000 English copies had been sold, and that didn’t even include the many thousands more that had been distributed in the United States.⁵

Until this point, few Americans had read Humboldt’s previous works, but Cosmos changed that, establishing him as a household name across the North American continent. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the first to obtain a copy. ‘The wonderful Humboldt,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘with his extended centre & expanded wings, marches like an army, gathering all things as he goes.’ No one, Emerson said, knew more about nature than Humboldt. Another American writer who loved Humboldt’s work was Edgar Allan Poe, whose last major work – the 130-page prose poem Eureka, published in 1848 – was dedicated to Humboldt and was a direct response to Cosmos. Eureka was Poe’s attempt to survey the universe – including all things ‘spiritual and material’ – echoing Humboldt’s approach of including the external and the internal world. The universe, Poe wrote, was ‘the most sublime of poems’. Equally inspired, Walt Whitman wrote his celebrated poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, with a copy of Cosmos on his desk. Whitman even composed a poem called ‘Kosmos’ and proclaimed himself ‘a kosmos’ in his famous poem ‘Song of Myself’.

Humboldt’s Cosmos shaped two generations of American scientists, artists, writers and poets – and, maybe most importantly, Cosmos was also responsible for the maturing of one of America’s most influential nature writers: Henry David Thoreau.

¹ The British polymath William Whewell coined the term ‘scientist’ in his review of Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review in 1834.

² Later that year, in September 1842, Charles and Emma Darwin moved to Down House in Kent.

³ Humboldt never had a chance to read the Origin of Species because he died before its publication in November 1859. But he did comment on another book – Richard Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Not propped up by scientific evidence like Darwin’s Origin of Species, Vestiges nonetheless included similarly incendiary statements about evolution and the transmutation of species. Humboldt, it was rumoured in scientific circles in Britain in late 1845, ‘supports in almost every particular its theories’.

⁴ Shocked by what it believed to be a blasphemous book, following the publication of Cosmos, a German church used its own newspaper to denounce Humboldt as having made ‘a pact with the devil’.

⁵ Humboldt did not earn any income from these translations as there was no copyright legislation in place. Only after 1849, when new laws were introduced, did Humboldt make some money from the volumes that were published after that date.