The Invention of Nature

JUST AS NEWS of Humboldt’s death arrived in the United States, George Perkins Marsh was leaving New York to return to his home in Burlington, Vermont. The fifty-eight-year-old Marsh missed the eulogies that were delivered in Humboldt’s honour two weeks later, on 2 June 1859, at the American Geographical and Statistical Society in Manhattan where he was a member. Buried in his work in Burlington, Marsh had become the ‘dullest owl in Christendom’, as he wrote to a friend. He was also completely broke. In a bid to replenish his funds, Marsh was working on several projects at the same time. He was writing up a lecture series on the English language that he had given in the previous months at Columbia College in New York, compiling a report on railway companies in Vermont and composing a couple of poems for publication in an anthology, as well as writing several articles for a newspaper.

He had returned to Burlington from New York, he said, ‘like an escaped convict to his cell’. Hunched over piles of papers, books and manuscripts, he hardly left his study and rarely spoke to anybody. He was writing and writing, he told a friend, ‘with all my might’, and with only his books as company. His library contained 5,000 volumes from all over the world with one entire section dedicated to Humboldt. The Germans, Marsh believed, had ‘done more to extend the bounds of modern knowledge than the united labors of the rest of the Christian world’. German books were of ‘infinite superiority to any other’, Marsh said, with Humboldt’s publications as the crowning glory. So great was Marsh’s enthusiasm for Humboldt that he was delighted when his sister-in-law married a German, a doctor and botanist called Frederick Wislizenus. The reason for Marsh’s approval was because Wislizenus had been mentioned in the latest edition of Humboldt’s Views of Nature – his qualities as a husband were seemingly of minor significance.

George Perkins Marsh (Illustration Credit 21.1)

Marsh could read and speak twenty languages including German, Spanish and Icelandic. He picked up languages as others picked up a book. ‘Dutch,’ he claimed, ‘can be learned by a Danish & German scholar in a month.’ German was his favourite and he often peppered his letters with German words, using ‘Blätter’ instead of ‘newspapers’, for example, or ‘Klapperschlangen’ instead of ‘rattlesnakes’. When a friend struggled to observe a solar eclipse in Peru because of the clouds there, Marsh referred ‘to what Humboldt says of the unastronomischer Himmel Perus’ – Peru’s unastronomical sky.

Humboldt was the ‘greatest of the priesthood of nature’, Marsh said, because he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature – a connection that would underpin Marsh’s own work because he was collecting material for a book that would explain how humankind was destroying the environment.

Marsh was an autodidact with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Born in 1801 in Woodstock, Vermont, the son of a Calvinist lawyer, Marsh had been a precocious boy who by the age of five was learning his father’s dictionaries by heart. He read so rapidly, and so many books simultaneously, that friends and family were always surprised at how he could grasp the content of a page with one glance. All his life people would remark on Marsh’s extraordinary memory. He was, as one friend said, a ‘walking encyclopaedia’. But Marsh was not only learning from books, he also loved the outdoors. He was ‘forest-born’, he said, and ‘the bubbling brook, the trees, the flowers, the wild animals were to me persons, not things.’ As a young boy, he had enjoyed long walks with his father who had always pointed out the names of the different trees. ‘I spent my early life almost literally in the woods,’ Marsh told a friend, and this deep appreciation of nature stayed with him for the rest of his life.

For all this ferocious appetite for knowledge, Marsh was surprisingly unsure about his career. He had studied law but was a useless lawyer because he found his clients rough and uncouth. He was a great scholar, but disliked teaching. He was an entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for disastrous business decisions and he sometimes spent more time in court dealing with his own affairs than with those of his clients. When he tried his hand as a sheep farmer, he lost everything when the price of wool dropped. He was the owner of a woollen mill that first burned down and then was ruined by drift ice. He speculated in land, sold lumber and quarried marble – always losing money.