All language subtitles for y2mate.com - Alexander von Humboldt Documentary

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200 years ago, a young natural scientist traveled for five years throughout the Spanish colonies of South America.

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Such an ambitious scientific expedition had never before been attempted in the interior of the New World.

On his return to Paris, tales of his exotic adventures in unknown jungles and on high

Andean peaks captured the public's imagination and turned the scientific explorer into popular hero.

Set at the time to be more famous than Napoleon.

His name?

Alexander von Humboldt.

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Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, dear friends, welcome.

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He was the last of the Universal Men who looked at any phenomenon and didn't just say how strange but said why and how and what.

He is in our past and yet in some way some important ways we are only starting now to catch up with Humboldt.

I think he inspired people, inspired people with his dedication, with his curiosity, with his magnificent science.

Alexander von Humboldt was born into the German aristocracy in 1769.

With his brother Wilhelm, he grew up on the family estate near Berlin.

With his father's early death, family life became more difficult.

The sensitive young Alexander would escape into a fantasy world of fiction and adventure,

captivated by such stories as Robinson Crusoe and the maritime expeditions of Captain James Cook.

In his heart, Alexander knew that he too was destined for adventure.

Since my earliest youth, I had an intense desire to travel in those distant lands which have been rarely visited by Europeans.

This urge brought me to a moment when life appears a boundless horizon,

and nothing attracted me more than the awakening of new emotions and the intense thrill of danger.

But what drew me to the tropics was not just the promise of adventures,

but a desire to see with my own eyes a grand and wild nature

and the prospect of collecting facts which might contribute to the progress of science.

Today, Humboldt's name is largely forgotten, and yet across the continents features and places bear testimony to his once great fame.

This story will rediscover the man who at the age of 29 set out for South America on an extraordinary adventure that would change the course of the history of science.

Mr. F. Humboldt, before your departure for the Americas, had you set out your intentions?

Yes, indeed. Let me quote from a letter written on the eve of our departure.

I shall collect plants and animals. I will analyze heat, electricity and the magnetic content of the atmosphere.

I shall measure mountains, but my true purpose is to investigate the interaction of all the forces of nature.

In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.

He was looking for a way to connect all parts of nature, and nature to Humboldt included human beings.

And that's important to realize, not only human beings as physical beings, but also our minds, our thoughts.

He wrote in his travel diary, everything is interaction, a less ist vixel vio con.

And that might indicate something of his idea of unity, to use all possible scientific methods to use all kinds of instruments,

but to be aware that a comprehensive view goes beyond measurement.

Humboldt set sail across the Atlantic for South America.

With him traveled his companion and colleague, the French botanist, Amy Bonpla.

Together, they had stowed on board the latest scientific equipment, intent on gathering as much information as they could about the natural world.

Humboldt was aware that in order to get an accurate picture of somewhere, you had to go there, you had to travel.

So travel was part of the process of understanding. You couldn't simply understand from a library in Paris or Berlin or London.

And he was very aware of that.

On the 16th of July, 1799, the ship arrived off the Venezuelan coast.

Humboldt was overwhelmed.

The pinnated leaves of the palm stood out against a blue sky. There was no trace of mist.

The sun climbed rapidly towards its center, spreading a dazzling light over a become sea.

The shore was abundant with pelicans, flamingos and herons.

The intense luminosity of the day, the vivid colours, the lush vegetation and the variegated plumage of the birds,

all bore the grand seal of tropical nature.

For Humboldt to go out into the field and see the plants, see the animals in their own place, see the landscape, look at the blue of the sky and the colour of the water and measure things, temperature, barometric pressure.

Nobody had related all of these things together before, but again to Humboldt, they were all part of that unity.

So all information was potentially useful in part of the picture.

In the first three days, we could barely proceed with any true scientific work.

We would pick up an object and within seconds rejected for a more striking one.

Bonplant assured me that he would go stark raving mad if the excitement didn't stop soon.

How bright the plumage of the birds, how colourful the fish.

But more overpowering than any single object was the impression of the whole entire mass of vibrant and luscious vegetation.

I knew I would be most happy in the days to come.

Here was the essence of Humboldt's approach.

Beyond the description of new and isolated facts, Humboldt wanted to understand the processes at work in nature's grand design.

Science up to then in its taxonomy, just listing, hadn't understood that the lists were all linked.

And I think he was an early perceiver that behind all these lists, these many, many facts, just books were full of facts.

There was some sort of harmony between them.

His stated goal at the outset is to see how forces interact in nature.

He's certainly laying the groundwork here for Darwin's theories.

So he was always on the brink of finding larger answers.

The two colleagues took up residence in the lively port of Kumuna and set about their studies.

Atmospheric measurements, specimen collecting, descriptions and illustrations.

Within three months, they had collected some 1,600 plants, describing 600 species new to science.

Humboldt made many drawings of these along with other sketches of snails and shellfish.

One of the excursions Humboldt and Bonpla made was a journey to the Carribe valley.

The aim was to visit a spectacular cave, home to a unique nocturnal bird, the guacharo, much prized by the Indians for its oil.

At the foot of the Torque Guacharo mountain and only 400 steps from the cave, we still could not make out its entrance.

The path follows a small winding stream.

At the last bend, you suddenly come across the enormous grotto opening.

We measured the way in by means of accord and went about 430 feet.

As the light began to fail, we heard the whole screams of the nocturnal birds that according to the Indians, live only in these underground caves.

It is difficult to give an idea of the dreadful noise made by thousands of these birds.

It cannot be compared to the noise of crows.

The guacharo's piercing scream reverberates against the rocky vault and echoes in the depths of the cave.

The Indians are in the sea, the sea of the sea, the sea of the sea, the sea of the sea, the sea of the sea, the sea of the sea.

The Indians showed us their nests by tying torches onto long poles.

The further we penetrated into the cave, the more the frightened birds scream.

It is creepy.

You go into this extraordinary cave, okay, you know what caves are like.

And suddenly you hear this amazing rattling, castanet-like call coming from the depths of the cave.

And you go further in and you go around a corner and that cuts out a lot of light and suddenly you're in pitch blackness.

The guacharo, completely unknown to naturalists, is about the size of our chickens.

They have the gate of vultures and silky stiff hairs surround their curved beaks.

Their breast is loaded with fat, known as guacharo oil.

It is used for preparing food in the monastery at Carapet.

Semi-liquid, clear and odour. It is so pure that it lasts for a year without going rancid.

The guacharo leaves the cave at nightfall.

To date, it is the only seed-eating nocturnal bird that we know.

One of the holistic discoveries that he made in terms of animals or plants was the guacharo bird.

The steartornis, the oil bird as it serves, is how difficult he called.

And it was a very remarkable thing. He didn't fully understand how it was that the birds found their way at the time.

But he nonetheless described it for the very first time.

Musiofon Homboldt, were all your observations in this new land so enriching?

Madam Azel, our house in Kumana was well situated for observing the sky and the stars.

But during the day there were also scenes we witnessed that disgusted us.

A part of the great plasuries where the slaves brought from Africa are sold.

Those put up for sale were young men aged between 15 and 20.

Every morning they were given coconut oil to rub into their bodies to make their skin shiny and black.

Bias would approach and examining their teeth would calculate their age and health,

forcing open their mouths as if dealing with horses at market.

It is distressing to think that still today in the Spanish West Indies,

slaves are branded with hot ions to identify them in case they escape.

This is how one treats those who save other men from the labour of working in the fields.

When I left America I retained the same horror of slavery I had previously felt in Europe.

The one thing that when you read the book that really gets him incandescent with range and pity is slavery.

Slavery in South America.

So he had all the admirable human qualities.

Humboldt and Bonpla spent the winter months of 1799 in the city of Caracas.

As the new century dawned they set out to study the surrounding countryside.

One trip took them to the shores of Lake Valencia.

A vast body of water the locals feared was mysteriously drying up.

They sought Humboldt's advice.

The shores of Lake Valencia are not famed solely for their picturesque views.

The basin presents several issues of great interest for natural historians.

What causes the lowering of the lake's water levels?

Is it receding faster than before?

Will the balance between the flowing in and the draining out be restored?

Or will the fear that the lake might dry up prove justified?

The destruction of forests, the clearing of plains and the cultivation of indigo over a half century,

has affected the amount of water flowing in as well as the evaporation from the soil.

Springs dry up or merely trickle.

Riverbeds remain dry and are then turned into torrents whenever it rains heavily on the hills.

By felling trees that cover the mountains, men everywhere have ensured at the same time two future calamities,

lack of fuel and scarcity of water.

Humboldt was someone who thought about the effects human beings had on nature,

but also the effects every single piece of nature had on other pieces of nature.

So he was someone who thought in terms of what we would call today ecology.

That was Humboldt's concept. He didn't have the word yet that came later.

But the concept was everywhere in his writings, and Darwin picks up on this very quickly.

Darwin develops the ecological view, and this enables him to start thinking in terms of historical change.

And eventually presents to him the problem that he solves by coming to the theory of evolution.

Humboldt's analysis at Lake Valencia predates modern ecology by a staggering 200 years.

His ideas clearly show nature as an interlocking system.

And yet for Humboldt, this scientific understanding was only part of the story.

True comprehension of nature he believed could not be separated from our own aesthetic experience of the world.

With the simplest statement of scientific fact, 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 all move in orbit marked out with mathematical precision.

As a scientist he was obviously recording the material effects of the universe,

but at the same time he never lost sight that it was the human being who was looking at nature.

Who was perceiving nature so that there was a subjective side, a poetic side that we have inside the world of sensations.

Who is there among us that does not feel moved beneath the embouring shade of a beach

or in the flowering meadow where the breeze murmurs through the trembling foliage?

This influence of the physical on the moral world,

this mysterious reaction of the sensuous on the ideal,

gives to the study of nature a peculiar charm which has not here the tube been sufficiently recognized.

What moves him in nature is that first moment of beauty, of awe, of sympathy, feeling for nature.

And this is for Humboldt, where it all begins.

You can't just approach nature intellectually, you have to have an emotional connection, an emotional bond.

And this is what moves you to want to know more.

In February 1800 the travellers left the Caribbean coast, crossing the plains of the Yannos, bound for the Oranoco River.

Ahead lay the wild jungles of the interior, in which Humboldt hoped to verify the existence of the legendary Kazakieri Canal,

whose waters mysteriously flow from the Oranoco to the Amazon, crossing the watershed.

Dressed in Parisian attire, with their Indian guides in a canoe stuffed with scientific instruments, notebooks and collecting boxes,

they must have been a surreal vision.

Soon the strange little party swallowed into the vast wilderness of the Oranoco rainforest.

Finding no suitable tree on the riverbank, we stuck our oars in the ground and fastened our hammocks to them.

Soon such a racket began in the forest that it was impossible to sleep for the rest of the night.

A wild screaming of creatures terrorized the woods.

The Indians were able to distinguish the monotonous whaling of howler monkeys, the cries of the peccary and the slope,

the shrill scream of parrots and other birds, and the staccato howling of the Jaguar.

For many months we listened to the same noises.

After three weeks the party reached the treacherous Ature's Mapure's Rapids.

This torrid 60km stretch of water divides the upper and lower reaches of the Oranoco.

As the Oranoco runs from south to north, it crosses a chain of granite mountains.

Twice checked in its course, the river breaks furiously against rocks that form steps and channels.

Nothing can be grander than this site.

It is as if the river, lit by the setting sun, hangs above its bed like an immense sheet of foam and vapours.

Beyond an unknown land begins.

He must have had the most fantastic...

Not courage exactly, but he did, had plenty of that too.

But just a brute ability to cope with the appalling routine and not complain.

The only sign of complaint is this massive discussion for all the various insects.

The mosquitoes which tormented us during the day became a swarm toward evening.

Our hands and faces had never been so swollen.

It is neither the danger of navigating in small boats, the threat of hostile Indians,

nor the serpents, crocodiles or jaguars that make Spaniards dread a voyage on the Oranoco.

It is they say with simplicity, El Sudaí, El Las Moscas,

the sweat and the mosquitoes.

You are attacked by different species as the day goes on.

You may get a five-minute break and then the zenku does come.

They have little white bits on their very long legs and massive snooter.

They are really painful.

Upriver, the little expedition parted from the main channel of the Oranoco,

taking a tributary to its headwaters.

Here the Indians hold the canoe over land for three days crossing the watershed

to reach the waters of the Rio Negro.

Now they were in the Amazon River system.

The task ahead was to unravel the mystery.

Could they return to the Oranoco by paddling back up the Kazukiari canal?

They were now entering one of the most remote jungles on earth.

The river was now in the river, the river was in the river.

In that interior part of a new continent, one almost accustomed oneself to regard men

as not being essential to the order of nature.

The earth is overloaded with vegetation and nothing impedes its growth.

Crocodiles and boas are masters of the river.

The Jaguar and the Peccary roam the forest without fear.

This ancient inheritance of wild and animated nature, in which man is nothing,

has something to it that is strange and sad.

To this we reconcile ourselves with difficulty.

We seek in vain the traces of the power of man.

We seem to have been transported into a world so different from that in which we were born.

There are deep moments when you feel a little more like a man.

It's a bit like looking up at the infinite sky and feeling.

It's a little bit different from that in which we were born.

There are deep moments when you feel utterly miniscule and isolated,

and alone even if you're with your Indian friends.

Vastated, I think, is probably Humboldt's word.

There are deep moments when you feel the infinite sky and feeling tiny looking at the stars.

But in a way it's much more personal and intimate.

Everything is going on around 200 foot high trees, Leona's extraordinary richness.

But utterly nothing would ever to do with you, nothing cares.

The severe conditions took their toll.

Provisions were all but exhausted and they were reduced to eating insects, roots and a few bananas washed down with river water.

Somehow they maintained their spirits, and after weeks in the wilderness,

their canoe emerged once more into the vast waters of the Oranoko.

Their extraordinary adventure had proved to the doubters in Europe the existence of anavicable Amazon Oranoko waterway.

22 days downriver, their canoe arrived at the town of Anastura.

Bonpla was sick with typhoid fever.

But after rest, recovered and returned with Humboldt to Kumuna.

It was August 1800, and the first major part of their expedition was over.

Humboldt and Bonpla spent the autumn on the island of Cuba, describing, classifying and dispatching specimens in manuscripts back to Europe.

By the following spring 1801, they were ready to return to the mainland of South America.

They set their sights on Colombia and the High Andes.

Their next great adventure had begun.

The local horses and mules are so sure-footed that they inspire confidence.

The while they're a country, the more acute is the instinct in domestic animals.

Whether mules glimst danger, they stop, but always choose the right course as long as you don't distract them or force them to continue.

In the Andes, you often hear people say, I will not give you a mule with a comfortable gate, but one that reasons best.

Humboldt's party now travelled to Quito, Ecuador via an arduous route along the High Andes.

It would take many months, but it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Now he and Bonpla could collect and compare the plants growing in the highlands, but above all, Humboldt could indulge his own passion.

Study in volcanoes.

It seems probable that the whole of the more elevated part of the province is but one huge volcano, of which the peaks of Cotapaxi and Pachintia rise as giant summits, whose craters are only vents for the subterranean lava.

In January 1802, Humboldt and Bonpla reached the Ecuadorian capital Quito, a city sighted at the foot of the imposing Pachintia volcano.

Ecuador had suffered in the terrible earthquake of 1797, which claimed some 14,000 lives.

Two years earlier, in Kumuna, Humboldt and Bonpla had experienced an earthquake, and now again in Quito they felt the tremors of the group.

When the earth, we think of it as so stable, shakes on its foundations.

One second is long enough to destroy long-held illusions.

It is like waking painfully from a dream.

We think we have been tricked by nature's seeming stability.

We listen out for the smallest noise.

For the first time we distrust the very ground we walk on.

But if these shocks are repeated, frequently over successive days, the fear quickly disappears.

In Quito, we never considered getting out of bed when at night there were underground rumblings which seemed to announce a shock from the Pachintia volcano.

Despite living in the shadow of fear, Humboldt noted that the people of Quito were lively and amiable,

and the city carried an air of well-being and easy living.

Humboldt and Bonpla were welcomed by the noble family of the Marquez de Silva Allegre.

His name was Juan Pio Montufar.

After the hardships of their adventures, the two travelers now found themselves in the lap of luxury.

There were dinner parties at fine townhouses and visits to the country Haciendas.

Everyone who was anyone wished to meet the celebrated European travelers.

Humboldt was the most important event in the early part of the 1800s that happened in Ecuador.

And so you can imagine how welcome Humboldt was at that time and how people wanted to share experiences with him and be with him.

But the headies social life did nothing to quench Humboldt's curiosity about the volcanoes that surrounded the city.

He set out to climb Pachintia. His first attempt ended in failure.

No one at the time climbed mountains, and Humboldt suffered altitude sickness becoming giddy and blacking out.

On deterred with an Indian guide, he reached the crater's rim at 15,000 feet on the second attempt.

Before them, loomed the huge steaming crater.

Blueish flames flickered in the depths. A sure sign that Pachintia was far from extinct.

Humboldt's adventures captivated the Marques' son, the dashing Carlos Montufar.

He accompanied Humboldt and Bonpla and quickly became an accepted companion.

Montufar would now join the travelers for the rest of the expedition.

And in turn, it seems Montufar introduced Humboldt to the alternative delights on offer in Quito.

I am the great, great grand nephew of Carlos Montufar.

Carlos, a younger man and his colleagues here locally and from the scientific community, apparently took him out to town.

The young girls were eager to meet him and I understand that Humboldt had a very good time in Quito.

Here it is said that Montufar introduced Humboldt to the seductive charms of Signora Antonia.

It is still rumored that she bore him a child.

Unless you're on Humboldt, can you confirm certain reports that not all of your adventures in Quito were of a scientific nature?

What salacious gossip did you hear?

Never mind.

What I will say is this.

The town of Quito breathes an atmosphere of luxury and gaiety.

And nowhere is there a population so entirely given over to the pursuit of pleasure.

But think on this.

Thus perhaps can manna custom himself to sleep in peace on the brink of catastrophe.

In June 1802, Humboldt, Bonpla and Montufar left Quito for the volcanic peaks to the south.

The route took them along the spectacular avenue of volcanoes.

But the main object of their attention was the celebrated volcano, Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain in the world.

Fortunately, the attempt to reach the summit of Chimborazo had been reserved for our last enterprise among the mountains of South America.

For we had by then gained some experience and knew how far we could rely on our own strength.

In many places the ridge was no wider than eight to ten inches.

To our left was a precipice of snow whose frozen crust glistened like glass.

On the right lay a fearful abyss.

With extreme exertion and considerable patience, we reached a greater height than we had dared to expect.

For we were constantly climbing through the clouds.

At certain places where it was very steep, we had to crawl on our hands and knees.

The edges of the rock were so sharp that our hands were painfully cut.

One after another we began to vomit from nausea and giddens.

He suffered from terrible altitude sickness.

I mean his nose was beating you, his stick you could hardly walk.

And if you go up that height for the first time effectively, I mean this was nobody else on that high.

You must worry about whether you're going to die.

Suddenly the mist began to dissipate.

Once more we recognized the dome-shaped summit of Chimborazo, now very close.

What a grand and solemn spectacle.

We hurried on, but all of a sudden our progress was halted by a ravine, some 400 feet deep.

Unfortunately this barrier proved insurmountable.

The softness of the snow preventing all attempts to scale the walls.

It was now an hour afternoon.

We set up the barometer with great care.

Air temperature was three below freezing.

According to the formula given to us by Laplace, we had now reached a height of 19,286 feet.

We were about a short way from the summit.

No more than three times the height of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.

It was a world record for human beings going that high that stood for 30 years or so.

And of course he did it with just straightforward gear.

I mean one is reminded a bit of the British party climbing Everest in 1924 and so on.

They did it. All he needed is a good Norfolk jacket and a couple of stout shoes.

That was more or less what he did.

Yet for all their adventures climbing volcanoes,

Humboldt never lost sight of his foremost scientific goal.

To try to reveal the laws of nature that he believed brought order to the natural world.

The adventures in the rainforest jungles had revealed an overwhelmingly complex wilderness.

Now by contrast on the mountain slopes Humboldt saw what nobody had understood before him.

The Andes displayed a clear vertical progression of vegetation and climate.

Of course like so many great thoughts they are amazingly obvious as soon as they are stated.

But before they are stated the world seems blind to them.

What he did was to demonstrate that if you climbed up a very high mountain in The Andes for example,

the plants changed their character as you went higher and it got colder.

And that this was paralleled by the fact that the plants also changed character as you moved from the equator northwards and it got colder.

So he set down the basic principles of plant geography.

Humboldt began to compose his seminal essay on the geography of plants.

To accompany this he sketched a tableau depicting the cross sectional profile of The Andes at Chimborazo.

The elaborate engraving beautifully illustrates the changing zones of vegetation.

Nobody had linked geography place with species in the way that Humboldt did.

There's wonderful maps of the mountain with the different zones of vegetation stretching up it.

That's the start of ecology.

It's bespattered with scientific names of plants showing exactly where they fit into the profile.

And that was a completely new idea.

In the autumn of 1802 Humboldt's expedition reached the Pacific coast and set sail for Mexico.

Here Humboldt spent the next year studying the rich cultural archives.

Then in the spring of 1804 the three companions sailed not for home but the United States,

reaching Philadelphia on the 20th of May.

Humboldt wrote to President Thomas Jefferson.

Mr. President arrived from Mexico on the blessed ground of this republic whose executive powers were placed in your hands.

I feel it is my pleasant duty to be a part of the world's most important part of the world.

I feel it is my pleasant duty to present my respects and express my high admiration for your writings, your actions and the liberalism of your ideas,

which have inspired me from my earliest youth.

I flatter myself in the expectation of expressing my sentiments personally to you.

Coming to North America and seeing the United States was tremendously important to him.

I mean he should have gone directly back to Europe.

He had so much at stake all his collections five years of research.

And yet he essentially detoured because he wanted to see the first free republic in the Americas.

Humboldt's faith in the accomplishments of American independence endeared him to Jefferson, who in turn considered Humboldt the most scientific man of the age.

Jefferson first invited him to Washington, where the two men got on so well that he then asked Humboldt to visit his Virginia home, Monticello.

Jefferson, who was an on-pretentious family man then 61 years of age, delighted in the company of the effervescent Humboldt.

They shared the same political convictions, and of course, the same interest in natural science.

We wonder what they talked about. Humboldt probably went easy on slavery.

That's understandable, but they definitely discussed the relationship between the continents, the New World and the Old World.

That we glean from Jefferson's letters later to Humboldt.

I think above all they discussed plants, Humboldt's great love.

So it must have been marvelous to be at the dinner table with the two of the people. We can guess that's the best we can do.

Jefferson, who had great ambitions for the opening up of the United States interior, saw in Humboldt's approach a model for the scientific exploration of a continent.

That was the time when the American frontier was expanding westward.

Jefferson had just sent out the Lewis and Clark expedition, so the federal government was actively supporting geographical exploration, and Humboldt provided a model for the world's most important part of the world.

And it was very important to be able to understand the future of the world's most important part of the world.

He was a very powerful leader in the United States, and he was a very powerful leader.

He had now witnessed the workings of the first free nation in the Americas, whose ideals he shared.

In early July 1804, Humboldt, Bonplant, and Montefar sailed for France, citing land in a record crossing of 27 days.

After five years, what had been the most ambitious scientific expedition of all time was over.

They had survived extraordinary dangers, and now arrived back in Paris to a rapturous welcome.

It was said that Humboldt was even more famous than Napoleon.

Humboldt was honored because everybody knew that although he had come from an elite and wealthy family, he had invested his entire personal fortune in the pursuit of knowledge, and not just the pursuit of knowledge for his own reputation, but to spread it to everyone.

He was the one who would listen so that he lectured to huge audiences and wrote popular books to extend the audience of science to everyone.

He became extremely famous. He was the right man for the right place, the right time, and so it's probably why Napoleon was jealous of him.

For Humboldt it was a new beginning. Over the next quarter of a century he produced 30 immense volumes, works that founded modern geography, ecology, and plant geography, and contributed to astronomy, botany, geology, meteorology, oceanography, and zoology.

Works that for much of the 19th century were the lens through which Europe saw South America.

Humboldt became a figure of science, something the way Einstein would be to the 20th century. Humboldt was very much that to the 19th century.

He was the icon of science who had brought everything together, showed that science could be grasped. All of science and scientific knowledge could be grasped by one human being.

There was no man of his age who was more sensitive to observe something unknown to him, to measure something he didn't know in advance.

So he had a deep respect for everything unknown foreign to him, a deep respect for nature and for a human society.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

Thank you.

Humboldt believed that he stood on the threshold of the age of science, and yet he foresaw the temptation of science to fragment in special arms.

Just as he sought harmony in nature, he believed in a unity of approach for the natural sciences.

But it did not happen.

The fragmentation of science that he tried to resist and the loss of aesthetics from science that he found incomprehensible succeeded in obliterating his name before the century was out.

A new star would rise. Charles Darwin's ideas in which nature became a battleground of struggle and competition would eclipse Humboldt's noble kingdom.

What he did do was create a framework for understanding science and really for generating modern science as we know it today.

The problem with creating the framework is that you look through the frame at what's at the other side. You never stop and look at the frame.

Humboldt was eclipsed by Darwin. It's as simple as that. Darwin's origin of species was so sensational that Humboldt was forgotten.

Darwin was deeply indebted to Humboldt. Would Darwin have gone South America without Humboldt's inspiration doubtful?

South America was not an obvious place to go. Darwin explicitly says that he wanted to go to South America after having rent Humboldt.

Humboldt writes about the distribution of animals and plants. And that is a very closely connected with the origin of species.

And that was the great puzzle. So that Darwin owed a lot to Humboldt and Martin Gray. He in fact called him the greatest naturalist in the world.

Whatever marks the character of a landscape, the profile of mountains, the deep gloom of pine forests, the mountain torrent rushing headlong over cliffs, all stand alike in an ancient and natural world.

And the mysterious communion with the spiritual life of man. From this arises the nobler portion of the enjoyment which nature affords.

And nowhere does she more deeply impress us with a sense of her greatness.

Nowhere does she speak to us more forcibly than in the tropical world.