The German Genius

compared and gathered” some 60,000 plant specimens, 6,300 of them unknown in Europe. Humboldt, however, was not just interested in geography, geology, and botany: he studied ancient Indian monuments, population figures, social arrangements, economic conditions. He was appalled by the slavery he witnessed and thereafter campaigned against it. He navigated the Orinoco and Magdalena rivers (which run respectively west–east through Venezuela toward Trinidad, and south–north through Colombia to the Caribbean), and confirmed the bifurcation of the Casiquiare River, showing that it really did connect the Orinoco and the Amazon as had been rumored. 32 Humboldt also set a new mountaineering record, climbing to 19,000 feet on Mount Chimborazo (Urcorazo, “snow mountain” in Quichua) in Ecuador in June 1802. He failed to reach the summit, but his record stood for nearly thirty years.
    They traveled with forty-two instruments—thermometers, barometers, quadrants, microscopes, rain gauges, eudiometers (for measuring oxygen in the air)—each with its own velvet-lined box. They nearly lost all these more than once as they tried to negotiate the many fearsome rapids along the Orinoco. It was on the Orinoco and its countless tributaries that Humboldt discovered a form of rubber, and where he found that the “natives” could distinguish a river by the taste of its water.
    In 1804 he returned to Europe via the United States, visiting Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., where he met President Thomas Jefferson in the White House and at Monticello and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. 33 On his return to Europe, Humboldt brought with him quinine, curare (the nerve poison), and dapicho , a substance similar to rubber. He was the first to stress the glories of the Inca and Aztec civilizations. In Paris he met Simón Bolívar, with whom he was to correspond until Bolívar’s death in 1830. Both could see the need for scientists to help in the development of Bolivia, and Humboldt did all he could to help.
    The journal he composed in the course of and after his travels was eventually published—in thirty-four volumes over twenty-five years. Not the least of its attractions were some 1,200 copperplates showing South American flora, fauna, and topography. He also wrote many specialist formal scientific treatises, in which he developed climatology as a science, established the specialities of plant geography and orography (the science of mountains), and initiated ideas that we still use today, such as mean temperature and the isotherm.
    In 1829 he was invited to explore Siberia as a guest of the Russian government. His 9,000-mile itinerary took in Kazan, the northern Urals, western Siberia as far as the Altai Mountains, and the edge of Chinese Tungusic territory. He successfully predicted the existence of diamonds in the Urals.
    In 1845, when Humboldt was seventy-six, he published the first volume of Kosmos , the second appearing two years later. 34 This turned out to be a triumph, a popular scientific book in the best sense. “The entire material world from the galaxies to the geography of various mosses is presented ‘in pleasing language.’” 35 Four volumes in all were published, and the singular nature of the book may be shown from the fact that, although it was a massive popular success, it contained more than 9,000 references.
    In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote: “During my last year at Cambridge, I read with care and profound interest Humboldt’s Personal Narrative . This work and Sir J. Herschel’s Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of the natural sciences.” On the centenary of Humboldt’s birth in 1869 the New York Times devoted the whole of its front page to Humboldt (there were no pictures and no advertisements). 36
    Humboldt also helped advance the careers of many young scientists, but perhaps his most enduring monument is that more places around the world have been named after Humboldt than anyone else—thirty-five in all: one city in Mexico, one in Canada, ten in the United States, three counties in the United States, nine bodies of water (including the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean), seven mountains and glaciers (including Humboldt Mountains in China and New Zealand), four parks or forests (including the Humboldt National Park in Cuba). There is also the