When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in the mid-eighteenth century, human beings understood that nature might be tamed; thus, we shut down fear and consequently the world became more predictable. Around the end of that century, Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s paternal grandfather, published a poem that spread like wildfire throughout England, entitled “Loves of the Plants”, in which he subtly –at the same time luminous– addressed the marriage between science and poetry, until not long ago fierce antagonists (Goethe’s Faust is the maximum expression of this new way of naming the world. In one passage, Faust acknowledges that this ecstatic search for knowledge regarding nature causes “a boil of my chest”). It is in that feedlot that Alexander von Humboldt was formed.
Born into a wealthy Prussian family, Humboldt dodged a life of privilege and comfort to devour a sizeable portion of the planet. On July 16, 1799, forty-one days following setting sail from La Coruña, he arrived on the coast of Venezuela. For three years he toured Latin America. In his time, Humboldt was considered the most famous person in the world, on a par with Napoleon. Each trip of the naturalist was celebrated not only by the courts to which he went to finance himself, but also by the scientific community and mere mortals, fascinated by the adventures of the legendary German.
Fame did not expire with his death. On September 14, 1869, the hundredth anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, there were celebrations in all corners of the planet. In New York, for example, the streets were covered with flags and banners with his face and his name. The ships that sailed the Hudson River were crammed with colored pennants. More than fifteen thousand people gathered in Central Park where an immense bronze bust of the humanist geographer was discovered. There were also festivities in Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Sydney, to name just a handful, but without a doubt the biggest celebrations were held in Berlin, his hometown, where despite inclement rain eighty thousand people gathered in the streets to remember it.
Today, more than two hundred years following his exploits, he continues to summon us. There is a huge forest preserve in California named following him, a vigorous Parisian artery too; Hundreds of plazas, monuments and even Latin American cities were baptized with the name of Humboldt (in Argentina, for example, a commune in Santa Fe); his name persists in the string of natural discoveries that have followed one another since his death: a glacier in Greenland, mountain ranges in China and Antarctica, rivers in Tasmania and New Zealand, a stream that runs along the coasts of Peru and Chile, and so on. . More than a hundred animals and almost three hundred plants also bear his name.
After the Latin American journey, between 1804 and 1827, Humboldt settled in Paris, where he compiled and published the material collected on his expedition, in thirty volumes entitled “Voyage aux Règions Equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent”, signed together with Aimé Bonpland. Only a dozen of these first complete editions exist in the world. One of them nests here, in the exuberant library of the Lillo Foundation, in San Miguel de Tucumán.
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