Conventional wisdom says that Humboldt's decision to join the Prussian mining department was essentially a compromise. 6 Ursula Klein prepared the first comprehensive study of Humboldt's career as a miner, while at the same time exploring the wider context of technical science that flourished in Prussia at the turn of the 19th century. If, as Michael Reidy has argued, Humboldt's way of thinking ultimately became the foundation of "the vertical consciousness that swept science in the early nineteenth century."
I demonstrate how some of the more conceptual and theoretical aspects of Humboldt's scientific enterprise were shaped by essentially economic concerns about labor and resource extraction. I argue that Humboldt's theories of human-plant relations, first developed in Forster's company, crystallized in the working world of the Prussian mines. Humboldt's "Cryptogamatic Study", "Forsterian Project" and "Subterranean Meteorology" to demonstrate what the 1790 voyage and, subsequently, the working world of mining was like.
The background to Humboldt's 'Forsterian project' and his research into the strangely green color of the subterranean flora was the self-styled revolution in chemistry of Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier. I interpret Humboldt's investigation into the 'corruption' of the mine air as a Priestleyan program steeped in Lavoisian nomenclature.45 In 1791 Humboldt was indeed a self-appointed one. In addition to Humboldt's plea for correspondence in botanical geography, there was his dissertation on 'social plants' and plant migration.
In 1791, remember, Humboldt told Uster his idea for a story of plant migration that showed how "plants surely follow peoples" and more specifically how "Europe was flooded with Caucasian plants." Humboldt's argument in the Essai is strikingly similar.
To represent whole countries as a mine”: the shaping of Humboldt’s cartography
The second argument in this section is that Humboldt's cartographic methods were equally dependent on patterns of vertical mobility above and below the earth's surface. Indeed, this ascent-descent rhythm marks one of the most consistent common threads in Humboldt's practice between 1791 and 1804. Humboldt's maps and tableaus have traditionally been seen in the pedigree of the French Enlightenment, if not as direct descendants of maps made by Charles Marie de La Condamine, whom one scholar called a "Humboldtian scientist avant la lettre." With regard to the.
66 Sylvie Romanowski, 'Humboldt's Pictorial Science: An Analysis of the Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins', in Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants, ed. José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra traced Humboldt's 'Tableau physique des Andes' to the work of the Colombian naturalist José de Caldas.67. Historian Rachel Laudan has argued that “before Humboldt's campaign for accurate measurements in the early nineteenth century, no heights had been measured with any accuracy.
Microcosmic Narratives of Nature in Early Modern Spanish America and (Other) Origins of Humboldt's Ecological Sensibility,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, eds. Finally, Humboldt's geognostic aspirations became something much more than just a "great work." They crystallized into a vertical approach to natural science. Of course, Humboldt's profiles in the Atlas géographique, with their emphasis on mountains and relatively vast scale, differ markedly from their Saxon predecessors.
Freieslebnov's “Sectional plan of part of the mine at Bunge-Hohebirge” and part of Humboldt's continent-spanning series of vertical profiles, published as “Tableau physique de. Indeed, a closer look at the middle section of the tripartite "Tableau physique de la Nouvelle Espagne" (Fig. 7, "Tableau du Plateau central des Montagnes") reveals Humboldt's inclusion of the Valenciana mine in New Spain, the deepest point he recorded at map scale. The "Geographic-Astronomical Introduction" to Humboldt's Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain provides a detailed, if retrospective, examination of the commercial motivations behind the maps he produced "shortly before [his] departure from the Royal Academy of Mines (Real Seminario de Mineria)" in 1803 .
It also shows how mining establishments were truly central to Humboldt's cartography in this period. Indeed, there is a sense in which Humboldt's Atlas geographique had been in the making before he ever set foot there. See Sandra Rebok, Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Illumination (Virginia: . University of Virginia Press, 2014) and Ingo Schwarz, “Alexander von Humboldt's Visit to Washington and Philadelphia, His Friendship with Jefferson, and His Fascination with United States,"
Northeastern Naturalist 8, Special Issue 1: Alexander von Humboldt's Natural History Legacy and Its Relevance for Today. Humboldt's maps were indeed representations of vertical motion, as only mountains and mines could provide.94.
Mining and the shaping of a “vertical consciousness”
The poet Goethe, himself a mining official in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was so enamored of the "Tableau physique des Andes" (the German edition that Humboldt dedicated to him) that he drew his own "Humboldt landscape". ” In Goethe's words, it brought “old and new worlds in a single comparative illustration” with the Alps on one side of a great valley and the Andes on the other. They study the power and influence of the stars; you examine the power of rocks and mountains, and the manifold workings of the earth's layers and its rock cover. For them the sky is the book of the future, while for you the earth reveals the monuments of the primordial world."97 A "vertical consciousness" was definitely in the air - above and below the ground.
Physical mobility was essential to the genesis of this "vertical consciousness." Historians have shown how, as a shift from the sea in views of nature swept Europe around the end of the nineteenth century, contemporaries imbued mountains and oceans with new meaning.99. In 1734, Carl Linnaeus described the mines at Falun, Sweden as a "complete portrait of hell."100 By the end of the century, however, many scholars of Linnaeus' social standing devoted themselves to it in earnest. A good starting point for understanding this change is Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature, whose main point is that commercial interests shaped Europeans' image of nature in ways that legitimized the exploitation of resources.101 The enthusiasm for mining around 1760 with really ignited enthusiasm for the underground in general; and the underground, in turn, was reimagined as a place for science and a destination for travelers.102 In the same decades that hundreds of social elites steeped in neoclassicism flocked to the caves of Italy, German publishers began printing descriptions of mining from and for travelers.103 The architect and metallurgist Franz Ludwig von Cancrin, for example, wrote his description of the finest mining works (1767) “to give dilettantes and travelers a taste of.
99 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World trans. Many of the most influential figures in Humboldt's life already had a passionate interest in mining and underground travel when their future protégé was still a boy. Hoffmann's story "The Mines of Falun," an old miner tells a young sailor that "if the blind mole burrows by blind instinct, it may be that the eyes of man gain more penetrating sight into the deepest depths of the earth , until they can recognize in the wonderful stones.
In a note (see figure 9) Humboldt observed how the British naval officer, James Clark Ross, described the deepest point of the ocean as "a very little below its surface. In the first volume of Kosmos (1845) Humboldt had recorded a distance of 45,000 feet "from the highest peaks of the Himalayas to the lowest basins containing the vegetation of a primordial world," he said. Only after we see the earth as the moon, without its liquid covering [flüssige Umhüllung] ”, declared Humboldt, “mountain masses and peaks, indeed the whole surface of the earth, will appear in their true form.”118 Recognizing the equal importance of geography above and below the surface of the sea, Humboldt had applied to oceans a concept he learned in the mines.
Ursula Klein argued that "Humboldt's visit to the Freiberg Mining Academy paved the way for this approach."124 And Alistair Sponsel has argued that part of what made Darwin appear. Writing in the spirit of the underground Enlightenment, with its enthusiasm for practical knowledge and public utility. Humboldt "Profile du Canal de Huehuetoca", engraved in 1808 and published in Paris in 1811 as part of Atlas geographique.
Humboldt's notes by James Ross's A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions (1847). Notice in that sweetest middle part of that note: “Tiefe des Meeres wie Montblanc James Ross T.
