Alexander von Humboldt , in painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806.
Most influential naturalistic traveler of his time and considered the ultimate polymath, Humboldt laid the foundation for modern geosciences, especially the Geography, besides Ecology, materializing and instrumentalizing the conception of dynamic integration of the spheres of nature, and gave us the idea of nature itself: "I will collect plants and animals, measure temperature, elasticity, magnetism and electricity in the atmosphere. analyze them, determine geographical longitudes and latitudes, measure mountains But this is not the main purpose of my trip My real and only purpose will be to investigate the links and interaction between natural forces and see how the inanimate natural world exerts its influence on animals and plants ".
Humboldt's travel accounts and other works made natural history accessible to millions and influenced Martius, Spix, Burmeister, Rugendas, Julio Verne, Aldous Huxley, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Simon Bolivar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Prussian King William IV declared that Humboldt had been "the greatest and most formidable of all men since the Flood." Humboldt lived with Goethe and Abraham Werner, related to Cuvier, Lund, and recommended Darwin. He helped young people like Agassiz, mathematician Fredrich Gauss, and botanist Joseph Hooker, and spread the work of Nicolaus Steno, previously obscure and later considered the founder of geology. By his letters of recommendation, Humboldt ruled the fate of scientists from around the world1.
Brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Friedrich Schiller's garden in Jena, present-day Germany. Wikimedia, Public Domain.
Humboldt was also an innovative cartographer. Their detailed maps increased the self-esteem of the Spanish colonies, giving boundaries to those countries that would soon become independent. Looking at maps of the northern portion of Latin America today we are looking directly at Humboldt's vision. This interest in mapping led him to become the first to realize how vegetation distribution is governed by climate. It was also the first to realize the equivalence between changes in latitude and altitude, to record the latitudinal gradient of diversity, and to demonstrate the relationship between area and species richness. In Brazil, perhaps because the Portuguese crown prevented him from entering the territory, perhaps because of his denunciations of colonialism and the economic exploitation of the environment and of human beings, especially indigenous and slaves, Humboldt is unfortunately not recognized as It is in Hispanic America. And his contribution to paleontology is almost forgotten, which further motivates this memory.
Humboldt and botanist Aimé Bonpland on the Tapia plain in Ecuador, opposite the Chimborazo volcano, the largest mountain of the world in relation to the center of the earth. Watercolor by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1810).
On his 1799-1804 trip to Hispanic America, Humboldt collected Cretaceous ammonites, gastropods, and bivalves from deposits in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, described in 1838 by their colleague Léopold de Buch (some in his honor), collected coal from limestone deposits located at altitudes above current vegetation, highlighting this record as an indicator of past climate change. Quaternary mastodont teeth found by him in the Ecuador above 2,600 m altitude, and in Chile, were sent to France to be studied by Cuvier. He described the Chilean specimen in 1824 as Mastodon humboldtii, honoring Humboldt. Ironically, the complicated taxonomic history of South American proboscids led to revisions that involuntarily reversed the intended homage. The specimens discovered by Humboldt in the Andes are today attributed to Cuvieronius , a genus created by the American Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1923 in honor of Cuvier, and containing a single species, Cuvieronius hyodon (Fischer de Waldheim, 1814)2. But there is no shortage of honors, given that Humboldt is the person in history with the most species and landforms in his honor.
The South American Mastodons Notiomastodon platensis and Cuvieronius hyodon . Bran-Artworks , DeviantArt.
In his great work, Cosmos, Humboldt discussed "missing links" that could be found as fossils and would help to understand the geographical distribution of the biotas. In Europe, studying the geology of the Jura Mountains (Western Alps), Humboldt recognized a succession that had not been included in the current stratigraphic arrangement established by Abraham Gottlob Werner and named it in 1799 as "Jura limestone" (Jura - Kalkstein), which became the basis for the later establishment of the system and the Jurassic period. His disciple Friedrich Sellow undertook important collections of rocks and coals in southern Brazil and, in 1825, sent to the Imperial and National Museum of Rio de Janeiro remains of glyptodons and sloths collected in the then Cisplatina Province, constituting the Museum's first fossil collection. National 3.
Humboldt in your library. Watercolor by Eduard Hildebrant, 1856.
Noting that biotas do not have a universal distribution and highlighting climate niches, he noted the Fossil Correlation. cuvieriana. While admiring Cuvier's monumental work, Humboldt was not much impressed by catastrophism, and was a "pre-Darwinian Darwinist" who, for the most part, did not witness the coming revolution. Humboldtian ecological thinking inspired Darwin and contrasted with Cuvier's physiological thinking, for whom the surroundings were related only to the physical environment in which the organism was inserted, regardless of the existence of other ecological interactions, which resulted from Cuvier's scant concern. with the environment. Humboldt's view that geological forces and the course of life are interrelated in space and time, and that human action has the scope of a natural catastrophe, brings us to the very concept of the Anthropocene. Already in its time, but especially today, Humboldt's integrated and interdisciplinary vision for nature and science is all we need to understand and avert the potential disasters of climate change.
1 Wulf A. 2016. A invenção da natureza ? A vida e as descobertas de Alexander von Humboldt. São Paulo: Editora Planeta. 600 p.
2 Mothé D et al. 2017. Sixty years after 'The mastodonts of Brazil': The state of the art of South American proboscideans (Proboscidea, Gomphotheriidae). Quaternary International, 443 (A): 52-64.
3 Paula Couto C. 1948. Sobre os vertebrados fósseis da coleção Sellow, do Uruguai. Boletim do Departamento Nacional da Produção Mineral, Divisão de Geologia e Paleontologia, 125: 1-14.
