Is Half a Humboldt Better Than None? Numbers and Wisdom in Natural History

In September 1869, to honor the centenary of the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, New Yorkers placed his bust on Explorers' Gate at 77^th Street and Central Park West—their contribution to what the New York Times described as "'Celebration Generally Throughout the Country.'" In those days Humboldt's name lay scattered on maps from the Humboldt Current in the Pacific to the Humboldt River (Nevada) and Humboldt County (California) and his ideas on the intellectual landscape from science to fine art. Only a decade before Frederic Church, the foremost landscape painter of the period, had exhibited to general acclaim and a stream of visitors his Heart of the Andes, a five and a half by ten feet canvas of a South American landscape that showed Humboldt's bio-geographical zones from tropic jungle to snow-capped peaks. Today, as Aaron Sachs mournfully notes and the blank in most readers' minds testifies, Humboldt's fame has dwindled to the names on the map. Visitors to Central Park pay more attention to the sledge dog Balto, immortalized in bronze at 67^th Street and East Drive, than to Humboldt's bust, and his name rouses associations only among historians of early-nineteenth-century science. Sachs wants to revive that reputation, less for historical justice than contemporary interest, for he believes Humboldt's "radical approach to nature and humanity makes him an astonishingly relevant figure for the twenty-first century," for his theories and writings provide a "powerful alternative" to the "simple, preservationist environmentalism I grew up with" and the "ecological science I subsequently studied" (p. 2).

The Humboldt current, which "formed an intellectual torrent that swept through the Western world—the United States in particular—for about a century before it evaporated in the desert heat of social Darwinism, which endorsed both human and environmental exploitation" ran so strongly because Humboldt, like Boss Plunkitt's honest grafter, seen his opportunities and he took 'em (p. 13). Born in Berlin in 1769, he came of age as Europeans were using natural history to organize their knowledge of a world they were so energetically exploring and he took full advantage of that expansive science. It took in research on the earth, the air, the oceans, plants, animals, even non-European peoples (a mélange modern natural history museums preserve to this day) and— descended from natural theology as much as natural philosophy—valued not just information but Higher Truths. In the course of a long and productive life (he died at ninety), Humboldt probed almost every aspect of the scientific field, and his writings established his wide fame. Early in his career, his Personal Narrative of the five years (1799–1804) he spent in the Americas defined the romantic figure of the scientist-explorer and inspired two generations of naturalists (a list that includes Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and John Muir) to head for the tropics. At its end his unfinished Cosmos, a survey of knowledge about the physical universe, caused an intellectual sensation in Europe and the United States. Explorer, collector, savant, social critic, and defender of the republican ideal, Humboldt filled the intellectual space created by the field in his time.

Sachs follows Humboldt's influence across half a century of American history through the lives and careers of a gloriously mixed cast of Humboldtian characters, ranging from an entrepreneur of exploration in Jacksonian America to a shipwrecked naval engineer in the 1880s. After an introductory chapter describing Humboldt's passion for finding connections—between the land and organisms, between organisms, between nature and culture—and his understanding of exploration as a process of self-discovery and change as well as discovery and conquest, Sachs develops these themes in four parts named for compass directions. "East" presents the two poles of Humboldt's thought, the "Radical Romanticism" that led him to climb volcanoes and explore the land...