The Inspiration of Humboldt's Science
Alexander von Humboldt explored South America in the years 1799-1804. In widely read works, including his Personal Narrative (1814-29) and his journal Kosmos, he excited readers with the wonders, the romance, and the science of the tropics, and created popular enthusiasm for exploration, travel, and natural history. He was considered the most important scientific discoverer of new information about South America, and inspired work in geography, geology, climatology, and ecology.
One example is the climatalogical equivalence of elevation and latitude -- such that "alpine" climate and biota can be found at low latitudes if one ascends high enough. The precise relationship is 3° latitude = 1000 m altitude = 3°F average temperature difference. The relationship can be mapped as isoclines -- lines of equivalent value.
As he wrote in Kosmos (1859), "In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments." To accomplish this, he mapped the geography of geology, climate "zones", and community assemblages of plants and animals.
Through his geographical work, he identified the orderly patterns of nature that lie beneath the profuse, exotic, confusing surface of rich tropical nature. In a treatise on the laws that govern the biogeographical distribution of plants, in 1821, he proposed that "the distribution of organized beings is like the other phenomena of the physical world. Amidst the apparent disorder which seems to be born of a multitude of local causes, we recognize the immutable laws of nature as soon as we focus on a great extent of country, or use a mass of facts in which the partial disturbances compensate one another." He inspired others to study wide geographical areas, with precise measurement of all sorts of detail, making extensive comparisons that would reveal the laws of nature. The kind of laws he envisioned took natural history beyond description to a science that "traces the connections and relations by which all plants are bound together among themselves," and would reveal in what conditions of land and climate they would be found. He provided an optimistic hope for continual new discovery, based on extensive geographic data.
Humboldt became a scientific hero, famed for both his adventurous exploration and his scientific results. His rich, evocative writing about the tropics combined empirical scientific inquiry with a literary sensibility, in his aesthetic response to the beauties of nature. Both his scientific reportage and his popular travel narrative also inspired interest in exotic travel, and European excitement about the broader world.