The German Genius

hospitals, and homeopathic cures are covered—amid great controversy—on the National Health Service.
    T HE S CIENTIFIC D ISCOVERY OF THE N EW W ORLD
     
    “[Alexander von] Humboldt has done more good for America than all her conquerors,” said Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan-born general credited with leading the liberation of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia. “[He] is the true discoverer of South America.” Ralph Waldo Emerson described Humboldt as “one of the wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar…who appear from time to time as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind.” A recent biography of Humboldt says bluntly that it is “quite possible that no other European had so great an impact on the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century America.” 26 In his day, Humboldt was as famous as Napoleon. He was friends with Goethe (who shared his interests in plants and mining), Schiller, and Gauss, and his brother Wilhelm founded the University of Berlin. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould described him as “the world’s most famous and influential intellectual.” He has also been described as “one of the greatest but least remembered figures in scientific history” and that is true too. 27
    Born in Berlin in 1769, he and his brother were tutored privately (their father was technically an aristocrat but had only recently been ennobled). All his life Alexander was a restless man. He was good at drawing and his self-portraits show a handsome face, though he wore his hair so as to conceal marks sustained from a childhood bout of smallpox. His brother found him “self-centered” and a “busybody,” which he feared others would construe as vanity.
    Humboldt enrolled as a law student at Göttingen when he was twenty; the son-in-law of one of his professors was Georg Forster who, as a teenager, had accompanied his father on James Cook’s second voyage around the world. 28 The younger Forster was already known for his highly acclaimed account of that adventure, and he and Alexander teamed up to make their own journeys across Europe, answering the latter’s restlessness but stimulating it too.
    Humboldt’s most important teacher in his early years was someone he encountered after he left Göttingen and attended the Freiberg School of Mines: Abraham Werner. After studying with Werner, Humboldt joined the Prussian mining service where he had a distinguished career. Using his own fortune to good effect, he invented—among other things—a safety lamp and a rescue device for miners threatened with a reduced air supply belowground. (He tested these mechanisms on himself in potentially dangerous experiments.) He was an out-and-out empiricist—facts, numbers, measurement, these, not philosophical speculation, were for him the building blocks of science.
    But it was Humboldt’s wanderlust that was to distinguish him from everyone else, and after a number of travels within Europe itself—looking at active volcanoes—he set out on the first of his two “great journeys.”
    The first, and the more momentous, was to South America. On October 20, 1798, he left Paris with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, who would be his traveling companion for the next six years. (Humboldt studied under Laplace and was fluent in French—most of his writings were in that language.) 29 They went first to Marseille and then on to Madrid, where Humboldt was introduced to the Spanish king and managed to persuade him to allow a scientific expedition to South America. This was remarkable, first because there had only ever been six scientific expeditions to Spain’s New World colonies (she was almost exclusively interested in the gold and silver to be obtained there) and second, because Humboldt was a Protestant. But the royal passports Bonpland and he obtained in March 1799 gave them total freedom of movement in the colonies. 30 They left from La Coruña and after breaking through the British blockade landed on July 16, 1799, in what would become Venezuela. Now began what has been called “the scientific discovery of the New World.”
    The two men faced great hardships and considerable danger as they traveled—on foot, by packhorse, in native canoes, and oceangoing ships—across Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia (where Bonpland caught malaria and they were delayed for two months), Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. 31 In the process, they “recorded, sketched, described, measured,