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M. Nicolson, 'Alexander Von Humboldt and The Geography of Vegetation', P. 0169-0185
M. Nicolson, 'Alexander Von Humboldt and The Geography of Vegetation', P. 0169-0185
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L.S . JACYNA
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Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1769.' As young men he and
his brother Wilhelm were members of the elite German literary circles.
Alexander became a personal friend of both Goethe and Schiller. He also
received a scientific education at the University of Gottingen and the Freiberg
School of Mines (Bergakademie). He later became famous for his experimental investigations, for his scientific expeditions - to the Americas from 1799 to
1804, and to Russia in 1829 - and for such major works as Personal Narrative
of Travels and Cosmos. He was a remarkable man of polymathic learning and
a synthetic habit of thought.
Antecedents of Humboldt's geographical concerns may be found in the work
of those German scholars who pioneered the academic study of geography in
the second half of the eighteenth century. Of special relevance to the present
discussion are Kant's lectures on physical geography! To Kant, it was
artificial to arrange objects into taxonomies, according to carefully selected
visible features, as had been done by Linnaeus. Such a form of classification
lacked
the idea of a whole out of which the manifold character of things is being derived .. . In
the existing so-called system of this type, the objects are merely put beside each other
and ordered in sequence one after the other!
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MALCOLM NICOLSON
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MALCOLM NICOLSON
tion of the programme for plant geography he had adumbrated in the Florae
Fribergensis Specimen.
The Essai sur la geographie des plantes (Essay on the Geography of Plants)
was first published, in French, in 1807." Like Chimborazo itself, the Essai
encapsulated, for Humboldt, the totality of the scientific and aesthetic impression made upon him by the tropics of South America. Such was its unique
importance that Humboldt originally intended that the Essai should be the
introductory volume to the full scientific account of his travels in the New
World.'s
The primary purpose of the Essai was 'to draw natural philosophers'
attention to the great phenomena which nature displays in the regions
through which I have travelled. It is their whole which I have considered in this
essa y.' 16 Humboldt directed attention to the 'whole' beca use Nature could not
be understood by concentrating only on particulars. Nature was one holistic
unity:
This science [la physique generaLel, which without doubt is one of the most beautiful
fields of human knowledge, can only progress .. . by the bringing together of all the
phenomena and creations which the earth has to offer. In this great sequence of cause
and effect, nothing can be considered in isolation. The general equilibrium, which
reigns amongst disturbances and apparent turmoil, is the result of an infinity of
mechanical forces and chemical attractions balancing each other out. Even if each
series of facts must be considered separately to identify a particular law, the study of
nature, which is the greatest problem of La physique generale, requires the bringing
together of all the forms of knowledge which deal with the modifications of matter."
173
The poetical works of the Greeks and the ruder songs of the primitive northern races
owe much of their peculiar character to the forms of plants and animals, to the
mountain valleys in which their poets dwelt, and to the air which surrounded them."
But the role of vegetation in mediating between Man and the physical
environment was a major one:
However much the character of different regions of the earth may depend upon a
combination of all these external phenomena ... the outline of mountains and hills, the
physiognomy of plants and animals, the azure of the sky, the forms of the clouds and
the transparency of the atmosphere, still it cannot be denied that it is the vegetable
covering of the earth's surface which chiefly conduces to the effect!O
Note that it is the vegetation en masse that is active in producing the
differences in aesthetic sensibility and moral development between races and
cultures. The individual plants are involved only as they contribute to the
collective phenomena of vegetation.
This holistic emphasis on vegetation ran throughout Humboldt's treatment of plant geography, not only in the Essai but also in his later works. It
constitutes one of the major novelties of his plant science and one of the
principal reasons why his work must be distinguished from that of older
botanists such as Johann Reinhold Forster and Karl Ludwig Willdenow.z '
Humboldt did not, of course, deny that the study of individual plants and
species was an important part of botany. But this was not the main focus of his
own botanical research, nor should it be, he argued, the exclusive concern of
other investigators:
Botanists' research is generally directed toward objects which merely embrace a very
small part of their science. They deal almost exclusively with the discovery of new
plants, with the study of their exterior structure ... and of the analogies which unite
them in classes and families ... it is no less important to establish Plant Geography, a
science that so far exists in name only, and yet is an essential part of La physique
generaLe!Z
but the man who is sensitive to the beauties of nature will ... find there the explanation
of the influence exerted by the appearance of vegetation over Man's taste and
imagination. He will take pleasure in examining what is constituted by the 'character'
of the vegetation and the variety of sensation it produces in the soul of the person who
contemplates it. These considerations are all the more significant because they are
closely linked to the means by which the imitative arts and descriptive poetry succeed
in acting upon us ... What a marked contrast between forests in temperate zones and
those of the Equator, where the bare slender trunks of the palms soar above the
flowered mahogany trees and create majestical portico arches in the sky ... How does
this ... appearance of nature, rich and pleasant to a greater or lesser degree, affect the
customs and above all the sensibility of people?lB
The vegetation was, of course, not the only feature of the environment
which was morally influential. In a later essay Humboldt noted that:
. .. preferring the connection of facts which have been long observed to the knowledge
of isolated facts, although they were new, the discovery of an unknown genus seemed
to me far less interesting than an observation of the geographical relations of the
vegetable world, or the migtation of the social plants, and the limit of the height which
their different tribes attain on the flanks of the Cordilleras.13
Humboldt's concern with holistic structures and the unity of landscape is
well exemplified by the 'Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins'. This isa
large and elaborate engraving, folded within the pages of the Essai. 14 It depicts
a cross-sectional profile of the Andes from the Atlantic to the Pacific at the
latitude of Chimborazo. In this one figure are mapped or tabulated which
plant and animal species live where, where the altitudinal zones of vegetation
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begin and end, the types of agriculture pursued, the underlying geological
structures and a wide variety of physical or meteorological data. The object
was to give, in a single illustration, a complete impression of a natural regionthe 'regions equinoctiales' of South America.
The 'Tableau', with its holistic vision of a unified landscape, is a very
typical Humboldtian production. However the concept it represents was not
unique to Humboldt but rather sprang from the wider background of German
Romanticism and Naturphilosophie. Humboldt enjoyed an enduring friendship with Goethe, to whom the German edition of the Essai sur la geographie
des plantes was dedicated. u The dedication page is illustrated with an
engraving which represents the genius of Poetry unveiling Nature. In the
foreground lies an open copy of Goethe's great botanical work, The Metamorphosis of Plants. Goethe studied Humboldt's work on plant geography
enthusiastically and drew an illustration for the text, 'a conventional picture
of a symbolic landscape', which he, in turn, dedicated to Humboldt (fig. H)."
This was not the only common ground between the two men. When Humboldt sent Goethe a copy of his Essai politique sur l'Ile de Cuba (1826), Goethe
complimented the author on not having omitted 'pointers to the incommensurable', despite the large amount of statistical information the work
contained. "
Humboldt also had a close intellectual association with Schiller. He wrote
an allegorical essay, 'The Genius of Rhodes', for Schiller's periodical Die
Horen. Despite later being vehemently criticized by Schiller and despite
having serious scientific disagreements with Goethe, Humboldt never repudiated his early intimacy with the leaders of the German Romantic movement.
He reprinted 'The Genius of Rhodes' in his 'favourite' and most 'purely
German' work, the compilation volume Ansichten der Natur (Views of
N ature)!" Humboldt's last and most ambitious major work, Cosmos, written
almost forty years later still, contains many passages which give high praise to
the Naturphilosophen!' Goethe's influence is acknowledged in the book's
introduction and much of the tex t is redolent of the Romantic tradition,
continuing to evince intellectual concerns seen in Humboldt's earlier worksin the Essai and especially in Ansichten der Natur.
To Humboldt, one of the principal attractions of the study of vegetation was
the extent to which the plant geographer shared the interests and joys of the
landscape artists. The two approaches to nature were mutually complementary. Humboldt suggested that the pictorial representation of landscape
would be improved if the painter studied the classification of plant form
developed by the plant geographer:
How interesting and instructive to the landscape painter would be a work that should
present to the eye accurate delineation of the sixteen principal forms enumerated both
individually and in collective contrast! What can be more picturesque than the
arborescent Ferns, which spread their tender foliage above the Mexican laurel-oak!
With the simplest statements of scientific facts there must ever mingle a certain
eloquence. Nature herself is sublimely eloquent. The stars as they sparkle in the
firmament fill us with delight and ecstasy, and yet they all move in orbits marked out
with mathematical precision."
What more charming than the aspect of banana groves, shaded by those lofty grasses,
the Gaudua and Bamboo! It is particularly the privilege of the artist to separate these
into groups, and thus the beautiful images of nature ... resolve themselves beneath his
touch ... into a few simple elements!O
MALCOLM NICOLSON
Natural science, if it was to be true to Nature, must be aesthetically satisfactory. Moreover it was not that the scientific faculty comprehended while the
aesthetic faculty merely appreciated. As we have seen, to Humboldt aesthetic
and emotional responses to natural phenomena counted as data about these
pheno"mena. Aesthetic reactions to the various sorts of vegetation were
indications of the particular effect of different natural environments upon
human society.
It has recently been argued that different traditions within
Naturphilosophie may be distinguished according to the role accorded to
aesthetics within natural inquiry.32 A major problem facing the philosophy of
knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century was how human reason, which
had only sense data to work with and was thus confined to the scrutiny of
external characteristics, could ever come to comprehend the inner realities of
things. The Kantian response was to argue that reason simply could never
have direct access beyond the phenomena. The best one could hope for was,
through establishing systematic interconnections and law-like relationships,
to organize natural phenomena into synthetic holistic schemata. But the
variety of Naturphilosophen which von Engelhardt has termed 'romantic' or
'speculative' was not prepared to accept a necessary dichotomy between the
understanding of the investigator and the object being investigated. They
proposed an alternative solution by which a theory of aesthetics came to the
aid of the theory of rationality. Man's aesthetic sensitivities could, if suitably
trained and applied, transcend the limitations of reason, penetrate beyond the
surface phenomena and, sensuously and intuitively, grasp the underlying
unities of Nature.
Humboldt is clearly sympathetic to this point of view:
180
... who is there that does not feel himself differently affected beneath the embowering
shade of die beeches' grove, or on hills crowned with a few scattered pines, or in the
flowering meadow where the breezes murmur through the trembling foliage of the
birch? A feeling of melancholy, or solemnity, or of light buoyant animation is in turn
awakened by the contemplation of our native trees. This influence of the physical on
the moral world - this mysterious reaction of the sensuous on the ideal, gives to the
study of nature, when considered from a higher point of view, a peculiar charm which
has not hitherto been sufficiently recognized. Jl
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The 'regions [which] form the natural divisions of the vegetable empire' were
thus real holistic entities in contrast to the artificial isolates on which
herbarium practice was based. 40 They existed 'not in the greenhouses and
books of botany but in Nature itself'."'
Regions of this sort were not, however, imagined to be topographically or
vegetationally homogeneous. The 'Tableau physique des Andes et pays
voisins' pictorially represented spatial differentiation within a single region.
The palm might be a characteristic plant of the 'regions equitoriales' but
palms were not distributed equally throughout its entire area. On the tops of
the mountains one found a 'region des lichens' or, lower down, a 'region des
Cinchona'. These smaller sorts of vegetational regions were distinguishable
by 'physiognomy' - that is, by the life-forms, the general appearance and habit
of growth, of the constituent plants.
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MALCOLM NICOLSON
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Similarly, species closely allied for the taxonomist might be put into different
physiognomic groups by the Humboldtian plant geographer.
Humboldt's interest in reducing the diversity of plant shapes to a small
number of fundamental life-forms is closely cognate with the concern of other
German naturalists - such as Goethe, Lorenz Oken and the Gottingen
professors, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and G. R. Treviranus - to identify
the ideal or primitive forms underlying plant and animal structure'" As
Humboldt expressed it:
The primeval force of organization, notwithstanding a certain independence in the
abnormal development of individual parts, binds all animal and vegetable structures to
fixed, ever-recurring types. 4S
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Thus in his study of plant physiognomy, as in much else of his plant science,
Humboldt gave empirical expression to the characteristic themes and preoccupations of German Romanticism and Naturphilosophie.
Alexander von Humboldt may be seen as both a product of German Romanticism and an important exponent of a Romantic style within natural inquiry.
He undoubtedly received formative influences from the intellectual milieu of
turn-of-the-century Romanticism and from his personal acquaintance with
the leading figures of the movement such as Goethe and Schiller. He combined
the inputs received from these sources with the more empirical but equally
holistic Naturphilosophie of his teachers at Freiberg and Gottingen. In
Humboldt's plant geography we can see a vivid example of the Romantic
commitment to a form of natural inquiry which would engage both Man's
spiritual and his rational faculties, which would effortlessly combine rigorous
empiricism and experimentalism with idealism and holism and which would
produce a vision of nature that was both aesthetically and scientifically
satisfactory.
NOTES
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MALCOLM NICOLSON
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FURTHER READING
Botting, D., Humboldt and the Cosmos (New York, 1973)
Bowen, M ., Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander
von Humboldt (Cambridge, 1981)
Cannon, S. F., 'Humboldtian Science', in her Science in Culture: The Early Victorian
Period (New York, 1978),73-110
Lenoir, T., 'Kanr, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology', Isis, 71
(1980),77-108
Macpherson, A. M., The Human Geography of Alexander von Humboldt' (unpublished University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D thesis, 1972)
Nicolson, M., 'Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldtian Science, and the Origins of
the Study of Vegetation', History of Science, 25 (1987), 167-94