Part 7

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was undoubtedly one of the greatest naturalists of the century which his life well nigh covered. Geologist, botanist, zoologist, and more, he was almost the last of the all-round naturalists. In this indeed lay his weakness as well as his strength, for great breadth of view is apt to imply a lack of precision as to details. In boyhood, “when life”, as he says, “appears an unlimited horizon”, he had strong desires after travel, which were in part gratified by excursions with George Forster and by Swiss explorations with the sagacious old geographer Leopold von Buch. These, however, only whetted his enthusiasm for journeys with a larger radius. At length, after many discouragements, he sailed in 1799 from Corunna, with Aimé Bonpland as companion, and spent five years in exploring the equinoctial regions of the New World. The full record of his voyage one cannot be expected to read, for there are about thirty volumes of it in the complete edition, but what we should all know is Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, in which the chief results of his explorations are charmingly set forth. Later in life (1829) he went with Ehrenberg and Rose to North Asia, and his crowning work was the publication of Cosmos (1845-58), which originated in a series of lectures delivered in the University of Berlin. In front of that building his statue now stands, along with that of his not less famous brother Wilhelm.

We think of Humboldt not so much as an early explorer of tropical America, nor because he described the habits of the condor and made observations on electric eels, nor because he furnished Cuvier and Latreille with many new specimens, but rather as a magnificent type of the naturalist-traveller, observant, widely interested, and thoughtful, who pointed forward to Darwin in the success with which he realized the complexity of inter-relations in nature. Many a traveller, even among his contemporaries, discovered more new plants and animals than the author of Cosmos, but none approached him as an all-round naturalist, able to look out on all orders of facts with keenly intelligent eyes, a man, moreover, in whom devotion to science never dulled poetic feeling. His work is of real importance in the history of geographical distribution, for he endeavoured to interpret the peculiarities of the various faunas in connection with the peculiar environment of the different regions--a consideration which is at least an element in the solution of some of the problems of distribution. It is especially important in regard to plants, and one may perhaps say that Humboldt, by his vivid pictures of the vegetable “physiognomy” of different regions, and by his observations on the relations between climate and flora, laid the foundations of the scientific study of the geographical distribution of plants. We find in some of his Charakterbilder, for example in his Views of Nature, the prototype of those synthetic pictures which give Brehm’s popular lectures their peculiar interest and value.

IV. THE SPECIALIST TYPE.--It would say little for scientific discipline if it were true that a man learned, let us say, in zoology, could spend years in a new country without having something fresh to tell us about matters outside of his specialism--the rocks, the plants, and the people. But it is not true. There have been few great travellers who have been narrow specialists, and one might find more than one case of a naturalist starting on his travels as a zoologist and returning an anthropologist as well. Yet it is evident enough that few men can be master of more than one craft. There have been few travellers like Humboldt, few records like Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1831-6). Hence we recognize more and more as we approach our own day that naturalist-travellers have been successful either as specialists, or, on the other hand, in so far as they have furnished material for generalization (Type V.). The specialism may of course take various forms: a journey may be undertaken by one who is purely an ornithologist, or it may be undertaken with one particular problem in view, or it may be organized, like the Challenger expedition, with the co-operation of a number of specialists.

The French took the lead in organizing zoological expeditions. As early as 1800 they sent out the Géographe, Naturaliste, and Casuarina, zoologically conducted by Bury de St. Vincent, Péron, and Lesueur. Further expeditions followed with Quoy and Gaimard, Lesson, Eydoux, Souleyet, Dupetit-Thouars, and others as zoological guides. The English whaling industry gave early opportunity to not a few naturalists; and it is now a long time since Hooker went with Sir James Ross on the South Polar expedition and Huxley went on the Rattlesnake to the Australian Barrier Reef. The Russians were also active, one of the more famous travellers being Kotzebue, who was accompanied on one of his two voyages (1823-6) round the world by Chamisso and Eschscholtz. In the early part of this century the Americans were also enterprising, the work of Dana being perhaps the most noteworthy. It would require several pages to mention even the names of the naturalists who have had their years of wandering, and have added their pages and sketches to the book of the world’s fauna and flora, but such an enumeration would serve no useful purpose here.

There is, however, one form of zoological exploration which deserves a chapter to itself, that is the exploration of the Deep Sea. Several generations of marine zoologists had been at work before a zoology of the deep sea was dreamed of even as a possibility. It is true that in 1818 Sir John Ross had found a star-fish (Astrophyton) at a depth of 800-1000 fathoms, but this was forgotten; and in 1841 Edward Forbes dredged to no purpose in fairly deep water in the Ægean Sea. Indeed those who thought about the great depths at all deemed it unlikely that there could be life there, and if it had not been for the practical affair of laying the ocean cables, we might possibly have been still in ignorance of the abyssal fauna.

But the cables had to be laid--no easy task--and it became important to know at least the topography of the depths. Cables broke, too, and had to be fished up again, and when that which ran between Sardinia and Algiers was lifted, in 1860, from a depth of 60-1000 fathoms, no less than 15 different species of animals were found on it. This was a discovery to fire enthusiasm, and Britain led the way in following it up. In 1868 Wyville Thomson began his explorations on the Lightning, and proved that most of the types of backboneless animals were represented at depths of at least 600 fathoms. Soon followed the similar cruise of the Porcupine, famous inter alia for the discovery of Bathybius, which many sceptics regard as a mare’s nest. From various quarters the quest after the deep-sea fauna began to be prosecuted.

It is now more than a score of years since the world-famous Challenger sailed from Portsmouth with Wyville Thomson, Moseley, John Murray, and Willemoes-Suhm as naturalists. During three and a half years the explorers cruised over 68,900 nautical miles, crossed the Atlantic no less than five times, reached with the long arm of the dredge to depths equal to reversed Himalayas, raised treasures of life from over 500 stations, and brought home spoils over which the savants of Europe have hardly ceased to be busy, and the records of which, now completed under Dr. Murray’s editorship, form a library of about forty huge volumes.

The Challenger expedition was important not only in itself, but in the wave of scientific enthusiasm which it raised. From Germany went forth the Gazelle; Norway sent the Vöringen to Spitzbergen; America has despatched the Tuscarora, the Blake, and the Albatross; from Sweden the Vega and the Sophia sailed to Arctic seas: Count Liechtenstein’s yacht Hertha explored Adria; the Prince of Monaco’s Hirondelle darted hither and thither; the French sent forth the Travailleur and Talisman; the Italians the Vettor Pisani and Washington; Austria and Hungary organized the Poli for work in the Mediterranean; the Germans again have recently specialized in investigating the Plankton, or surface-life of the ocean; and so, with a range even wider than we have indicated, the wave of enthusiasm has spread, one of the latest barques which it has borne being the Prince of Monaco’s, which was specially built for marine exploration.

Specialism in travelling has, of course, gone much further. Thus to cite only three examples, we have Semper’s zoological work on the Philippines, the researches of the Sarasins in Ceylon, and the first results of Semon’s recent visit to Australasia, all of them passing far beyond records of zoological exploration into monographs on the structure and development of characteristic members of the fauna of these countries. And it is no exaggeration to say that private enterprise, Royal Society subsidies, British Association grants, and the like have sent scores of naturalists from Britain half round the world in order to solve special problems, as to the larva of a worm, for instance, or as to the bird-fauna of some little island.

V. THE BIOLOGICAL TYPE. In some ways the most important scientific journey ever made was Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. It was the Columbus-voyage of zoology. There is a great deal to be said for the Wanderjahre of the old students, for to have time to think is one of the conditions of intellectual progress. Not that the Beagle voyage was one of idleness, but it gave Darwin, at the age of twenty-two, a wealth of impressions and some measure of enforced leisure wherein to gloat intellectually over what he saw. He has said, indeed, that various sets of facts observed on his voyage, such as the aspect of the Galapagos Islands, started him on paths of pondering which eventually led to his theory of the origin of species.

We take Darwin as the type of the biological, or, we may almost say, evolutionist travellers; but he must share this position with his magnanimous colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, whose journeyings were more prolonged and not less fruitful. Before Darwin the naturalist-travellers had been, for the most part, describers, systematists, and analysts, and it goes without saying that such work is indispensable, and must continue; but in the light of the conception of evolution all things had become new; the present world of life was henceforth seen as a stage in a process, as a passing act in a drama, not merely as a phantasmagoria to be admired and pictured, but as a growth to be understood.

It is within this group of biological travellers, which includes such men as Bates and Belt, that we must also place Brehm. For although he perhaps had not the firmness of grasp or the fineness of touch necessary for the successful handling of the more intricate biological problems, especially those which centre around the factors of evolution, he had unusual power as an observer of the habits of animals. His contributions, which must be judged, of course, from his great Tierleben, as well as from his popular lectures, were rather to the old natural history than to biology in the stricter sense. His works show that he was as much interested in men as in beasts, that he was specially an ornithologist, that he was beneath the naturalist a sportsman; but so scores of other travellers have been. His particular excellence is his power of observing and picturing animal life as it is lived in nature, without taking account of which biology is a mockery and any theory of evolution a one-sided dogma.

This well-known treasure-house of Natural History appeared originally in 1863-69 in six big volumes, which have since increased to ten. Even the first edition took a foremost place among similar works on the Natural History of Animals. With a wealth of personal observation on the habits of animals in their native haunts, it combined the further charm of very beautiful pictorial illustration.

Let us now bring together briefly the outstanding facts of this historical outline.

In early days men followed their wandering herds or pursued their prey from region to region, or were driven by force of competition or of hunger to new lands. Many of the most eventful journeys have been among those which had to be taken.

I. Gradually, intellectual curiosity rather than practical need became the prompter, and men travelled with all manner of mixed aims seeking what was new. When they returned they told travellers’ tales, mostly in as good faith as their hunting ancestors had done in the caves of a winter night, or as the modern traveller does after dinner still. We pass insensibly from Herodotus to Marco Polo, from “Sir John Maundeville” to Mr. X. Y. Z., whose book was published last spring. This is the type romantic.

II. But when science shared in the renaissance there ensued the extraordinary industry of the encyclopædist school, with which many naturalist-travellers were associated. Some of these were great men--perhaps Gesner was greatest of all--but all had the defects of their qualities. They gathered into stackyards both wheat and tares, and seldom found time to thrash. The type survives afield in the mere collector, and its degenerate sedentary representatives are called compilers.

III. Just as Buffon represents the climax of the encyclopædists, and is yet something more, for he thrashed his wheat, so Humboldt, while as ambitious as any encyclopædist traveller, transcended them all by vitalizing the wealth of impressions which he gathered. He was the general naturalist-traveller, who took all nature for his province, and does not seem to have been embarrassed. Of successful representatives of this type there are few, since Darwin perhaps none.

IV. Meanwhile Linnæus had brought order, Cuvier had founded his school of anatomists, Haller had re-organized physiology, the microscope had deepened analysis, and zoology came of age as a specialism. Henceforth travellers’ tales were at a discount; even a Humboldt might be contradicted, and platitudinarian narratives of a voyage round the world ceased to find the publisher sympathetic or the public appetized. The naturalist-traveller was now a zoologist, or a botanist, or an ornithologist, or an entomologist; at any rate, a specialist. But it was sometimes found profitable to work in companies, as in the case of the Challenger expedition.

V. Lastly, we find that on the travellers, too, “evolution” cast its spell, and we have Darwin and Wallace as the types of the biological travellers, whose results go directly towards the working out of a cosmology. From Bates and Belt and Brehm there is a long list down to Dr. Hickson, The Naturalist in Celebes, and Mr. Hudson, The Naturalist in La Plata. Not, of course, that most are not specialists, but the particular interest of their work is biological or bionomical.

I have added to this essay a list of some of the most important works of the more recent naturalist-travellers with which I am directly acquainted, being convinced that it is with these that the general, and perhaps also the professional student of natural history should begin, as it is with them that his studies must also end. For, not only do they introduce us, in a manner usually full of interest, to the nature of animal life, but they lead us to face one of the ultimate problems of biology--the evolution of faunas.

II.

Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829-1884) was born at Unter-Renthendorf in Sachsen-Weimar, where his father--an accomplished ornithologist--was pastor. Brought up among birds, learning to watch from his earliest boyhood, accompanying his father in rambles through the Thuringian forest, questioning and being questioned about all the sights and sounds of the woods, listening to the experts who came to see the famous collection in the Pfarr-haus, and to argue over questions of species with the kindly pastor, young Brehm was almost bound to become a naturalist. And while the father stuffed his birds in the evenings the mother read aloud from Goethe and Schiller, and her poetic feeling was echoed in her son. Yet, so crooked are life’s ways, the youth became an architect’s apprentice, and acted as such for four years!

But an opportunity presented itself which called him, doubtless most willing, from the desk and workshop. Baron John Wilhelm von Müller, a keen sportsman and lover of birds, sought an assistant to accompany him on an ornithological expedition to Africa, and with him the youth, not yet out of his teens, set forth in 1847. It was a great opportunity, but the price paid for it was heavy, for Brehm did not see his home again for full five years, and was forced to bear strains, to incur responsibilities, and to suffer privations, which left their mark on him for life. Only those who know the story of his African journeys, and what African travel may be with repeated fevers and inconsiderately crippled resources, can adequately appreciate the restraint which Brehm displays in those popular lectures, here translated, where there is so much of everything but himself.

After he returned, in 1852, rich in spoils and experience, if otherwise poor, he spent several sessions at the universities of Jena and Vienna. Though earnestly busy in equipping himself for further work, he was not too old to enjoy the pleasures of a student life. When he took his doctor’s degree he published an account of his travels (Reiseskizzen aus Nordostafrica. Jena, 1855, 3 vols.).

After a zoological holiday in Spain with his like-minded brother Reinhold--a physician in Madrid--he settled for a time in Leipzig, writing for the famous “Gartenlaube”, co-operating with Rossmässler in bringing out Die Tiere des Waldes, expressing his very self in his Bird-Life (1861), and teaching in the schools. It was during this period that he visited Lapland, of whose bird-bergs the first lecture gives such a vivid description. In 1861 he married Matthilde Reiz, who proved herself the best possible helpmeet.

In 1862, Brehm went as scientific guide on an excursion to Abyssinia undertaken by the Duke of Coburg-Gotha, and subsequently published a characteristic account of his observations Ergebnisse einer Reise nach Habesch: Results of a Journey to Abyssinia (Hamburg, 1863). On his return he began his world-famous Tierleben (Animal Life), which has been a treasure-house to so many naturalists. With the collaboration of Professors Taschenberg and Oscar Schmidt, he completed the first edition of this great work, in six volumes, in 1869.

Meanwhile he had gone to Hamburg as Director of the Zoological Gardens there, but the organizing work seems to have suited him ill, and he soon resigned. With a freer hand, he then undertook the establishment of the famous Berlin Aquarium, in which he partly realized his dream of a microcosmic living museum of nature. But, apart from his actual work, the business-relations were ever irksome, and in 1874 he was forced by ill-health and social friction to abandon his position.