By the end of the XVIII century. on the geographical map of the globe, the contours of all the continents were quite accurately plotted. Only Antarctica, the extreme north of America, and some islands in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean remained unknown. But significant interior spaces of the continents still remained “blank spots” or were depicted on maps schematically and implausibly. The “mystery of the Nile” (where its sources are located) was not solved, none of the explorers but penetrated into the wilds of the tropical forests of Africa, no one climbed the high volcanic peaks of the Cordilleras of Central and South America, not a single European crossed the vast deserts and highlands of Central Asia. The mountains of Central Asia were presented to geographers as chains of active volcanoes, the peaks of which go to transcendental heights. Many inquisitive travelers and geographers dreamed of visiting these unexplored lands, full of mystery, but not without dangers.
The young Alexander Humboldt also dreamed of this. He was born in 1769, in the family of a German nobleman. His childhood passed on the estate of his mother, in the Te-gel castle, where a magnificent park was laid out with many overseas plants. High-ranking nobles and officials of the royal court often gathered in the castle and in the Berlin house of the Humboldts.
Alexander Humboldt and his older brother Wilhelm received a good education. At Tegel Castle, Alexander Humboldt became addicted to studying the plants of the park, to collecting various collections. With great interest, he observed the nature around him. As a child, he was jokingly called "pharmacist", which in those days meant "scientist".
From the age of 18, he listened to lectures at German universities - in Frankfurt, Berlin, Göttingen, and then studied geology and mining at the Freiberg Mining Academy.
In those days, many young people were fond of traveling. "Geography," they said, "is the queen of the sciences." Humboldt did not sit still either. In 1789 he traveled through West Germany and then along the Rhine and wrote his first scientific work on the Rhine basalts.
The very next year, Humboldt toured Holland, England, and France. His companion naturalist Georg Forster participated in his youth with his father in James Cook's second circumnavigation of the world. In London, Alexander Humboldt and Georg Forster met the famous scientist J. Banks, who accompanied Cook on his first circumnavigation.
These travels and meetings further strengthened Humboldt's desire to explore distant lands. In 1792, he entered the service and took up mining. Constantly making trips to the mines of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, he at the same time carefully studied botany, zoology and physiology. Being in Paris in 1797, he wanted to take part in the round-the-world expedition of Captain Baudin. But the expedition was postponed. Humboldt and his botanist friend Bonplan decided to go to Africa. They also failed to do so. Then they went to Spain, where they received permission from the government to explore the nature of Spanish possessions in Central and South America.
Humboldt's dreams of visiting tropical countries came true.
In 1799, Humboldt and Bonpland set sail on the ship Pizarro from the harbor of Coruña. In the Canary Islands, they climbed the Teide volcano.
Arriving in Venezuela, explored the surroundings of the city of Caracas and traveled through the llanos.
Here is how Humboldt described the llanos of Juno America in dry and rainy times: “When the sun in a constantly cloudless sky chars the green ant with its sheer rays and turns it into dust, the dried earth reveals clefts, as if after a strong earthquake ... Like animals in the icy countries of the north numb from the cold, so here, from the heat, crocodiles and boas, hiding deep in dry clay, hibernate. Drought spreads death everywhere: meanwhile, the refracted rays of light present to the thirsty traveler a deceptive image of a troubled sea. A narrow stream of air separates distant palm bushes from the Earth. Due to the optical illusion that comes from the contact of layers of air of unequal warmth and, consequently, unequal density, palm trees seem to hang. Horses and oxen roam everywhere, covered with a thick cloud of dust and tormented by hunger and terrible thirst; at the same time, the oxen emit a dull roar, and the horses, stretching their necks, strongly inhale the wind into themselves in order to discover the existence of a puddle by the humidity of the air current, which has not yet had time to completely evaporate ...
Finally, after a long drought, a beneficent rainy time will come, and the scene in the steppe is rapidly changing. The dark azure of the sky, hitherto not covered by a single cloud, becomes lighter ... Some solitary clouds rise vertically above the horizon and seem like distant mountains. Dense vapors, like fog, spread little by little to the very zenith. Thunder peals from afar announce the approach of rain ... With the advent of the sun, grassy mimosas open their leaves, clogged with rain, and thus greet the rising of this luminary, just as birds - with their morning singing, and flowers of marsh plants - with their unfolding. Horses, oxen then scatter across the steppes to enjoy life. The tall grass hides the variegated jaguar; in a safe, hidden place he waits for his prey; if animals pass by him, he, having measured the size of the jump with his eye, rushes at them, like the cats and tigers of Asia.
According to the stories of the natives, on the banks of the swamps, wet clay sometimes slowly rises and forms hills. Soon afterwards there is a great crash and the earth is ejected high up, as if from the eruption of small slag volcanoes. Whoever understands this phenomenon quickly runs away, because soon a monstrous water serpent or armored crocodile crawls out of the pit, brought out of its lethargic sleep at the first downpour. Little by little the rivers rise and overflow."
Exploring the country, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed in a boat with the Indians along the Orinoco, Casiquiare, a tributary of the Rio Negro Amazon. Here they observed a curious phenomenon: r. Orinoco separates part of the water from itself and in the form of a river. Casiquiare goes into another river - the Rio Negro. This is called the bifurcation of the river, its bifurcation.
Having studied the Llanos, the travelers went to the island of Cuba, and from there to Peru. Having reached the city of Quito with great difficulty, the researchers climbed the volcanoes Cotopaxi, Chimborazo and others, on the slopes of which they observed how vegetation zones change sharply depending on the height.
Having reached the city of Lima, Humboldt and Bonpland went by sea to Mexico. Here they stayed for about a year, studying the nature, population, economy and ancient culture of the country. Finally, they visited the harbor of Veracruz, visited Havana and from the Delaware Bay (USA) went back to Europe.
The journey took five years. Its results for science were enormous. The processing of the materials collected by scientists - records, collections, drawings - the description of the journey itself and the publication of thirty volumes with tables and maps took twenty-five years.
Sometimes, interrupting work on the materials of the expedition, Humboldt traveled around Europe. Together with the famous geologist Leopold Buch and the physicist Gay-Lussac, he traveled to Italy and climbed Mount Vesuvius. Living now in Paris, now in Berlin, he did not interrupt his scientific work, being especially carried away by the study of the phenomena of magnetism.
For many years, Humboldt dreamed of traveling to India and the islands of the Malay Archipelago, but he did not manage to go there.
In 1829, at the invitation of the Russian government, Humboldt arrived in Russia, having made the last great journey of his life. He came to Russia already at the age of sixty, being a world-famous scientist.
Even earlier, he was elected an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Russian scientific societies.
In Russia, Humboldt was especially interested in the amazing accumulation of minerals and various minerals in the Urals and Altai. From St. Petersburg, Humboldt went to Moscow, and from there through Kazan to the Middle Urals, then to Western Siberia, the Baraba steppe and Altai, then to the Southern Urals, the Volga to Astrakhan, and from there again to Moscow and St. Petersburg. In December 1829 Humboldt returned to Germany.
The expedition in Russia was short-lived, covered a vast area and, of course, could not give such results as the work in America, but nevertheless Humboldt published a number of articles and two books describing his expedition.
Humboldt died in 1859. He lived a long time - 90 years. Possessing a very broad outlook, the scientist was engaged in a wide variety of sciences: mathematics, mechanics, geology, botany, etc. He saw many countries in his lifetime, was closely acquainted with the remarkable people of his time - Goethe, Schiller and many others. All his life Humboldt was a real hard worker. He said that he developed the habit of sleeping only five hours a night, giving work the rest of the time.
Humboldt is considered one of the founders of modern geography. He dealt with a variety of its sections.
In climatology, Humboldt accurately established the differences between maritime and continental climates. He developed a way to identify climate features through isotherms - lines connecting points with the same temperature. He created a network of meteorological stations in Germany to study climates. At his suggestion, the first observatory in Russia was created in the vicinity of St. Petersburg to study the Earth's magnetism and to constantly monitor meteorological phenomena. He studied sea currents. Humboldt attached great importance to the study of electrical phenomena in nature. Studying the vegetation of America and other countries, he discovered a number of new plant species, wrote a book on plant geography.
Exploring the relief of the globe, Humboldt proposed a method for calculating the average height of mountain systems and continents as a whole. He carefully studied all the materials on the relief of Central and Central Asia and proposed his hypothesis about the structure of the surface of these vast expanses of land. Finally, Humboldt introduced many new ideas about the structure of the earth's crust. In his time, two camps of scientists fought in geology: one - "Neptunists" - argued that all rocks originated by depositing them in the seas and oceans; others - "Plutonists" - believed that all rocks were of volcanic origin. Humboldt at first adhered to the views of the "Neptunists", but then correctly recognized that rocks arose in both ways. He discovered several minerals unknown to science, wrote a lot about minerals, in particular about the minerals of the Urals.
Humboldt always sought to elucidate the general geographical laws of nature. He was the first to establish the vertical zonality of vegetation in the mountains of America and describe it. In his remarkable book "Pictures of Nature", he gave vivid characteristics of nature also in latitudinal zones (forests, steppes, deserts, etc.).
Humboldt considered geography primarily as a scientific regional study. At the same time, he considered the comparison of the nature of some countries with the nature of others to be an important method of scientific and geographical knowledge. He considered all natural phenomena to be connected with each other. Geography, in his opinion, should clarify these connections, as well as the influence of some phenomena and processes on others.
Humboldt said that the main goal of his work in geography was to find and explain the connection between phenomena in nature. This task is considered one of the main ones in the geography of our time.
Thus, Humboldt really laid the foundations of modern physical-geographical geography and scientific regional studies.
Humboldt's desire to find and explain universal connections in nature was reflected in his five-volume work Cosmos. He worked on it throughout his scientific career. In "Cosmos" Humboldt wanted to collect and summarize all the achievements of contemporary science about the nature of the Universe. This work was published, published three times and in Russian.
But science advanced so rapidly that much of Cosmos was outdated as early as the 19th century. Some of Humboldt's positions in geology, as well as his doctrine of the earth's relief, are outdated.
The name of Alexander Humboldt as a scientist will forever remain in geographical science. It is marked in many places on the map. A mountain range in Central Asia, a river and a lake in North America, an area in California with the city of Humboldt near Humboldt Bay, a glacier in Greenland, mountains in Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand, as well as several plant species, the mineral humboldtite, are named after him. and finally, a crater on the moon.
If you find an error, please highlight a piece of text and click Ctrl+Enter.