The Invention of Nature

When thirty-two-year-old Darwin arrived at Murchison’s house, he saw an old man with a mop of silver-grey hair, dressed as he had been during his Russia expedition in a dark tailcoat and a white necktie. This was his ‘cosmopolitan outfit’, as Humboldt called it, because it was suitable for all occasions whether he met kings or students. At seventy-two, Humboldt’s walking had become more careful and slower, but he still knew how to work a room. When he arrived at a party or gathering, he usually shuffled through the room, his head slightly tilted and nodding to the left and right as he passed the others. Throughout this opening sequence, Humboldt’s flow of words did not stop once. From the moment he entered a room, everybody else fell silent. Any comment made by someone else only inspired Humboldt to make yet another long philosophical excursion.

Darwin was stunned. Several times he tried to get in a word but eventually gave up. Humboldt was cheerful enough and paid him ‘some tremendous compliments’ but the old man just talked too much. Humboldt gushed on for three long hours, chattering away ‘beyond all reason’, Darwin said. This was not how he had envisaged their first encounter. After all those years of worshipping Humboldt, and of admiring his books, Darwin felt a little deflated. ‘But my anticipations probably were too high,’ he later admitted.

Humboldt’s endless monologue made it impossible for Darwin to have a meaningful conversation with him. As Humboldt’s lecture continued, Darwin’s thoughts drifted in and out. Then he suddenly heard Humboldt talking about a river in Siberia where the vegetation on the opposite banks was ‘widely different’ despite the same soil and climate. Darwin’s interest was piqued. The plants on one side of the river were predominantly Asian and on the other European, Humboldt reported. Darwin caught just enough to be intrigued but had missed much of the detail in Humboldt’s barrage of words – yet he didn’t dare interrupt. Back at home, Darwin immediately scribbled everything he could remember in his notebook. But he was unsure if he had understood the older scientist correctly: ‘have two Floras marched from opposite sides & met here?? – strange case,’ Darwin wrote.

Darwin was thinking and collecting material for his ‘species theory’. Seen from the outside, Darwin’s life ran like ‘Clockwork’, as he said, built around a routine of work, meals and family time. He had married his cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839, a little more than two years after his return from the Beagle

voyage, and they now lived with their two young children in London.² In his mind, though, Darwin was engaged with the most revolutionary thoughts. He was also often ill, suffering from headaches, abdominal pain, fatigue and inflammation of his face, but he still produced essays and books, all the while deliberating about evolution.

Most of the arguments he would present years later in his Origin of Species

had already crystallized, but the meticulous Darwin was not rushing to publish anything that was not solidly argued and underpinned with facts. Just as he had written a list of the pros and cons of marriage before proposing to Emma, so he would bring together everything related to his theory of evolution before presenting it to the world.

If the two men had talked properly that day, perhaps Humboldt would have discussed his ideas of a world governed not by balance and stability but by dynamic change – thoughts that he would soon introduce in the first volume of Cosmos. A species was a part of the whole, linked both to the past and future, Humboldt would write, more mutable than ‘fixed’. In Cosmos

he would also discuss the missing links and the ‘intermediate steps’ that could be found in the fossil records. He would write about ‘cyclical change’, transitions and constant renewal. In short, Humboldt’s nature was in flux. All these ideas were precursors to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Humboldt was, as scientists later said, a ‘pre-Darwinian Darwinist’.³

As it was, Darwin never talked with Humboldt about these ideas, but the story about the river in Siberia continued to occupy him. Then, in January 1845, three years after Humboldt’s visit to London, Darwin’s close friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, went to Paris. Knowing that Humboldt was also in Paris on one of his research trips, Darwin used the opportunity to ask Hooker to enquire further about the conundrum of the flora at the Siberian river. He insisted that Hooker first remind Humboldt that Darwin’s whole life had been shaped by his Personal Narrative. With the flattery out of the way, Darwin instructed Hooker then to ask Humboldt ‘about the river in NE Europe, with the Flora very different on its opposite banks’.