The Invention of Nature

Despite all the attention, Humboldt often felt removed from his contemporaries. Loneliness had been his loyal companion throughout his life. Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours, and that a solitary light flickered from the window of his study deep into the night as he worked on the fourth volume of Cosmos. Humboldt still liked to walk every day, and could be seen with his head bowed, slowly meandering in the shadow of the great lime trees of the grand avenue of Unter den Linden in Berlin. And whenever he stayed with the king in the palace in Potsdam, Humboldt liked to wander up the little hill – ‘our Potsdam Chimborazo’ as he called it – to the observatory there.

The famous boulevard Unter den Linden – with the university and the Academy of Sciences to the right (Illustration Credit 20.2)

When Charles Lyell visited Berlin in 1856, shortly before Humboldt’s eighty-seventh birthday, the British geologist reported that he found him just as ‘I knew him more than thirty years ago, quite up to all that is going on in many departments’. Humboldt was still quick and sharp, he had few wrinkles and his white hair was full. There was ‘nothing flabby about the face’, another visitor remarked. Though he had become ‘meagre with age’, Humboldt’s whole body was animated when he was talking and people forgot how old he was. There was still ‘all the fire and spirit’ of a man of thirty in Humboldt, one American said. He remained as restless as he had been as a young man. Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit. One moment he was standing at his shelves searching for a book, and at another bending over a table to roll out some drawings. He was still able to stand for eight hours if he had to, he boasted. His only concession to age was the admission that he was no longer agile enough to climb the ladder to reach for a book from the top shelf in his study.

Humboldt still lived in his rented apartment in Oranienburger Straße and his finances remained precarious. He didn’t even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive. Humboldt was living above his means but continued to support young scientists. By the 10th of the month he had usually run out of money and sometimes had to borrow from his devoted servant Johann Seifert, who had been in Humboldt’s service for three decades. Seifert had accompanied Humboldt to Russia and now ran the household at Oranienburger Straße together with his wife.

Most visitors were surprised by the simplicity of Humboldt’s living arrangements: an apartment in a plain house not far from the university that his brother Wilhelm had founded. Whenever visitors arrived, they were welcomed by Seifert. He would take them to the second-floor flat where they would walk through a room filled with stuffed birds, rock specimens and other natural history objects, then on through the library and into the study where the walls were lined with yet more bookcases. The rooms overflowed with manuscripts and drawings, scientific instruments and more stuffed animals, as well as folios filled with pressed plants, rolled-up maps, busts, portraits and even a pet chameleon. There was a ‘magnificent’ leopard skin on the plain wooden floor. A parrot interrupted conversations when it shouted Humboldt’s most common instruction to his servant: ‘Much sugar, much coffee, Mr Seifert.’ Boxes cluttered the floor and the desk was surrounded by piles of books. A globe stood on one of the side tables in the library, and whenever Humboldt talked about a particular mountain, river or town he would get up and spin it.

Humboldt hated the cold and kept his apartment at an almost unbearable level of tropical heat, which his visitors quietly suffered. When conversing with foreigners, Humboldt spoke in several languages at the same time, switching within a sentence between German, French, Spanish and English. Although he was losing his hearing, he had lost none of his wit. First comes deafness, he joked, and then ‘imbecility’. The only reason for his ‘celebrity’, he told an acquaintance, was because he had lived to such an old age. Many visitors commented on his boyish humour, such as his much repeated joke about his chameleon which was like ‘many clerics’, he said, in its ability to look with one eye to the heavens and with the other to the earth.