Humboldt's "Views of Nature"

I love antique books, and I like to find notable science books from the nineteenth century. Every so
often, I write about them on this blog, teaching myself many new things in the process. Click the label "science" below, and you'll find my previous posts (along with my Galapagos photos!).

The red book is book is the French translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur: mit wissenschaftlichen Erläuterungen (1808, expanded edition 1849). The book was translated into English as Aspects [or Views] of nature, in different lands and different climates with scientific elucidations. 

Laura Dassow Walls wrote a wonderful book (which I discovered before Wulf’s, below), The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). She writes:

“…years before, when in Berlin’s darkest days, his homeland conquered by Napoleon, [Humboldt] had put together what he called his favorite book, Ansichten der Natur, a collection of essays recalling the beauty and pathos of the tropics. In his preface he had stated, ‘It is to minds oppressed with care that these pages are especially consecrated.’ Humboldt was evoking the wisdom of Kant, who had written that in an age of oppression, the role of the intellectual was to energize the people with hope for better times, les they lose heart in the possibility of reform and accept, in Muthu’s words, ‘the injustice of the modern world as an inevitable necessity.’ Kant’s model was Humboldt’s old friend and teacher Moses Mendelssohn, who had despite every reason for a debilitating pessimism had believed it yet possible to create tolerance and civil rights for Jews. Humboldt’s language of nature, of harmony and freedom, provided not escape but hope that change is possible, oppression can be lifted, and injustice made right. His New World became a state on which a new future might be reimaged for all humanity” (47-48).

Andrea Wulf’s book, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Knopf, 2017), has this passage: “In Views of Nature, Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings.’ … What we might take for granted today—that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood—was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist. Views of Nature again described nature as a web of life, with plants and animals dependent on each other… The lessons that he had begun with his sketch after the ascent of Chimborazo, the Naturgemälde, now became broader. The concept of Naturgemälde became Humboldt’s approach through which to explain his new vision” (133)

She writes earlier that Humboldt’s “infographic" painting of Chimborazo was named
Naturgemälde, meaning a “painting of nature” but https://geographical.co.uk/places/mapping/item/1542-the-invention-of-nature
implying a sense of wholeness and unity (88). See also

Wulf goes on to write that Goethe, Thoreau, Emerson, Darwin, Jules Verne, and others read Views of Nature. Walls also writes considerably about Humboldt’s influence.

Table of contents of the 1850 American edition.