Sublime

The young Latin American intellectual Simón Bolívar had sought him out in Rome one year to talk about political freedom. John Charles Frémont, who regarded Humboldt as a god, had gone off exploring and sprinkled Humboldt’s name all over the map of Nevada. John Bachman would say that his own interest in natural history began with meeting Humboldt at

He would be regarded as the incomparable high priest of nineteenth-century science—a towering godlike inspiration to such a disparate assortment of individuals as John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Charles Lyell, Simón Bolívar, W. H. Hudson, William Hickling Prescott, Edward Whymper, Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz. Da

In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new car

All told they spent nearly two years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. From Bogotá they went over the Andes on foot, picking the more difficult of two possible routes. They were in the Andes, crossing and recrossing, from September 1801 until October 1802, and they must have made a picturesque caravan, with their guides and mules and scientific instr

Darwin would confide that Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics, read over and over again during his youth, had inspired his entire career. Darwin also liked Humboldt’s account of an earthquake at Caracas enough to have lifted some of it, pretty much intact, for his Voyage of the Beagle.