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The meeting with Humboldt
On dit souvent en société, que je m’occupe de trop de choses à la fois, de botanique, d’astronomie, d’anatomie comparée. Mais peut-on interdire à l’homme d’avoir le désir de savoir, d’embrasser tout ce qui l’environne ? Pour un voyageur, la variété des connaissances est indispensable.
It is often said in society that I am occupied with too many things at the same time, botany, astronomy, comparative anatomy. But can we forbid a man to have the desire to know, to embrace everything that surrounds him? For a traveler, the variety of knowledge is indispensable.
wrote Alexander von Humboldt in Mes Confessions.
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin on September 14, 1769. He was the youngest son of a German noble family, his father being Baron de Humboldt. He received a complete education for his time that should make him an accomplished gentlemen. More than his education, what interested Alexander the most were the natural sciences, he collected insects, all kinds of minerals but also books, especially those dealing with travel. Besides what interested the young man, learning was difficult. Nevertheless the genius Alexander von Humboldt took his revenge on his studies once he became an adult. It was the discovery, in adulthood, of sciences like botany, geology – then called physics of the globe – that he finally studies in self-taught, which offers him a vocation.
At the universities of Frankfurt and Göttingen he studied physics and chemistry, while at the same time taking courses in business with Spittler, archaeology with Heynes, and above all natural sciences with Blumenbach. It was these encounters during this period that gave Humboldt the taste for travel. Indeed, it was at that time that he travels for the first time to Holland and England. After a tour of Europe, with scientific purposes, Humboldt thought of Egypt and went to Paris in 1798 to leave with Lord Bristol. There he met many scientists like Gay Lussac, the botanist Jussieu, the chemists Vauquelin, Thenard or Chaptal, as well as the mathematicians Delambre, Borda and Laplace. A meeting that marked the young scientist was with Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the author of Voyage autour du monde, who even offered to accompany him on his next expedition. But Bougainville was replaced by Baudin before the expedition was cancelled.
During this period, Alexander made one of the most important encounters of his life, Aimé Bonpland, a marine surgeon but especially a botanist. Bonpland and Humboldt had the same passion for travel and science, and their common enthusiasm pushed them to live extraordinary adventures turned towards the development of knowledge and science. After some rebounds, at the end of May 1799, Alexander von Humboldt, and his friend Aimé Bonpland finally embarked from Spain for their journey to the Americas. It will last five years. On board the Pizarro, they set sail towards the Canary Islands and then the Caribbean Sea. From then on, Humboldt began his scientific observations of what he saw of his journey. It took them to the heart of New Granada, a loop along the banks of the Orinoco River in present-day Venezuela, and a passage that took them to Lima in present-day Peru, crossing all present-day Colombia.
Alexander von Humboldt’s meeting with Don José Celestino Mutis, a Jesuit scholar, in 1801 at Sante Fé in Bogotá was not by chance. The Spanish scientist, who had arrived on the new continent as the Viceroy’s physician, had acquired, not without merit, his reputation as a botanist of the Enlightenment by imposing his style through the Expedición Botánica. He understood and began to build a botany that included a vision of exchanges in nature in its broadest sense. Humboldt, with his endless scientific curiosity, was a most fertile mind for discussing botany as a science of nature and the result of its many phenomena.
Essai sur la géographie des plantes is the fourteenth volume of the collection. What makes it quite particular for an essay on botany is that Humboldt wants to include botany in a vast field of study with geography but also climatology and geology. It is then, a new approach which testifies to the passion of Alexander and Aimé for all the sciences of nature but also of a global vision of the environment that they shared with Mutis. This geographical framework and this new vision would have germinated in the mind of the two men after the meeting with Mutis. It is therefore up to Humboldt to collect, describe and expose the framework and methodology of study of this geography of plants that gives, in a way, birth to the phytogeography.
This website is the introduction of an augmented digital version of the fundamental treaty of the geography of plants, that Humboldt partly inspried by Mutis exposes in the Essai sur le géographie des plantes.