Contribution of Alexander Von Humboldt towards Modern Geography

In this article we will discuss about the contribution of Alexander Von Humboldt towards the development of modern geography.

Humboldt was the last of the great polymaths. He mastered a number of disciplines and put all his energy into travel and research in order to understand the whole complex system of the universe. He contributed to so many branches of science that his work is almost as difficult to summarise as Carl Ritter’s.

At various times, he did research in botany, geology, physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, history and all aspects of geography. On several occasions Humboldt had to defend himself against the charge of being too versatile.

Life and Works of Alexander Von Humboldt:

He was born in Berlin in 1769 and belonged to the family of a Prussian land-owning aristocracy. His father was an officer in the Prussian army. The unity of human races, an idea which Humboldt pioneered in the latter part of his academic career, seems to have been developed on account of his frequent meetings (arranged by his mathematics tutor) with the Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn.

With him and others, Humboldt discussed matters relating to the contemporary social inequities of an aristocratic society and drew up plans to do something about these things. He also attended the lectures on scientific subjects, delivered by the noted physician, Marcus Herz, who was a disciple of Immanuel Kant. These lectures had a profound impact on the thinking of Humboldt. He also witnessed the demonstration of scientific experiments which Marcus performed.

At the age of 18, Humboldt entered the University of Frankfurt, but there he stayed for six months only. In 1789, he entered the University of Gottingen, where he had the opportunity to meet George Forster who had lately returned from his voyage around the world with Captain Cook.

Before Humboldt came into contact with George Forster, he was very fascinated by geology, and this fascination led him to organise a short scientific tour, in the autumn of 1789, to the Rhineland Basaltic region. He published a short monograph and several articles on the Rhineland Basalt and attempted to uphold the current theory of the aqueous origin of basaltic rock.

However, in the company of George Forster, Humboldt made his first foreign tour in 1790 through Holland, Belgium, central and southern England and northern France. Forster’s interest in geography, his method of careful observation and critical treatment of facts, and above all his talent for artistic though scientific description of landscape made an indelible impression on his young companion. Humboldt said later that his interest in geography started with his acquaintance with George Forster.

After he came back from the foreign tour, Humboldt joined the School of Mines at Freiberg in Saxony in 1791 where he met the famous geologist and scholar A. G. Werner. There, Humboldt attended lectures in physics, chemistry, geology and mining.

In 1792, he was appointed as the director of mines in the Prussian state of Franconia. His official position provided him opportunities to travel across southern Germany and carry out extensive investigations in botany, geology and meteorology. His active mind was always formulating new questions about almost everything that caught his imagination and attention.

He is said to have studied the effect of different rocks on magnetic declination. He also carried out scientific experiments on the subterranean plants which he found growing in the underground mines and in 1793 published his first scientific paper, based on the results of these findings. There was no limit to the range of his curiosity and he wanted to travel and see for himself what the different parts of the world were like.

Humboldt visited Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, on which trip he observed the rock structure of the Alps and tested some of the ideas of the Swiss scholar, Horace Benedict de Saussure, who thought that the deep Alpine valleys had been cut by the rush of water in the receding flood. Visits to his brother Wilhelm, who was then living in Jena, brought Humboldt into contact with Goethe and Schiller, which strengthened his aesthetic appreciation of and philosophical approach to nature.

Humboldt gave up his government job in 1797 after the death of his mother, and began to plan for travelling. In Paris, he had access to a variety of instruments and learned how to make use of them. There he met Pierre Simon Laplace and learnt from him how to use the aneroid barometer to determine elevations above sea level. Humboldt had to call off his expedition to Egypt and also to the Pacific due to some unavoidable circumstances.

In 1798, he sailed with the French botanist Aime Bonpland across the Mediterranean Sea. The purpose of the voyage was to go to Marseilles and then to sail for Algiers, from where they intended to travel overland to Egypt. However, the plan could not succeed as the ship was wrecked off the coast of Portugal before it ever reached the shores.

They then decided to set out for the city of Madrid. On the way to Madrid, Humboldt made daily observations of temperature and altitude, and he was the first to make an accurate measurement of the elevation of the Spanish Meseta. In Madrid, Humboldt’s position in the Prussian aristocracy gave him access to the ruling aristocracy and he succeeded in getting permission to visit the Spanish colonies in America.

Humboldt and Bonpland sailed for America in June 1799. They returned to France in 1804 and Humboldt lived in Paris until 1827. In Paris itself, Humboldt was much influenced by one of the five methodological precepts of August Comte’s ‘le reel’ which meant that the scientific status of knowledge had to be guaranteed by the direct experience of an immediate reality, and this required a particular conception of causality in which causal relations amounted to regular associations between phenomena. It can be said that Humboldt was impressed by Comte’s positivist approach.

Exhausted financial position forced him to go back to Berlin in 1827. He was offered a post of Chamberlain to the King of Prussia which he accepted. In 1829, Humboldt was invited by the Russian Tsar to explore the virgin lands of Siberia across the Ural mountains.

Expeditions to America:

Humboldt and Bonpland landed at Cumana, in what is now Venezuela, and then went to Caracus. One of the first places they visited was the Basin of Volencia in the midst of which is the Lake Valencia. Humboldt found Lake Valencia being shrunk and crops were being grown on the flat lake-bed soil from which the lake water had receded. He presumed the existence of a continuous cover of tropical forest around the Basin of Valencia which had now been cut down and the lands were being used for agriculture.

Humboldt, who had earlier learnt about Buffon’s theory that the removal of forests caused the drying up of rivers and climatic change, was the first to test this theory by confronting it with the empirically observed facts which he noticed around the Basin of Valencia.

In 1800, they explored the Orinico and established the truth of its connection with the Amazon. They mapped some 1,725 miles of the Orinio River, mostly through uninhabited forests. Humboldt established the exact latitudes of places they visited and came close to correct longitudes.

They collected some 6,000 plant specimens and rock specimens, all of which were transported to Caracas and then to Cuba. In 1801, they arrived in the Colombian port of Cartagena and from there began the exploration of the Andes of Columbia, Ecuador and Peru.

Humboldt drew sections along the Andes based on 1500 of his own measurements and started the practice of using these profiles to show the altitudinal belts of vegetation, an idea conceived during his visit to Teneriffe (1799). He also used them to show geological structure and, though not the first to do so, he demonstrated their value and geological cross-section so successfully that their invention is frequently attributed to Humboldt.

He provided the first scientific description of the relation of altitude, air temperature, vegetation and agriculture in tropical mountains. He is said to have disputed the idea of A. G. Werner regarding the origin of rocks when he closely observed the rocks of the Andes.

Humboldt collected, classified and interpreted plants, animals and rocks with respect to their origin and their graphic distribution, and he was the first to draw cross-sections of relief in order to show the altitudinal limits and zones of correspondence of the phenomena which he everywhere systematically observed. He also collected measurements of heights, areas, length and so forth to discover the areal distribution and interrelation of phenomena.

He climbed most of the volcanoes of Ecuador and in 1802, along with Bonpland, he scaled the Mt. Chimborazo, reaching an altitude of 19,286 feet which was the highest known peak of that time. Humboldt offered explanation regarding the effect of altitude on human beings and deduced that the feeling of dizziness resulted from low air pressure. He pointed out the symptoms of mountain sickness.

Humboldt and Bonpland finally reached Lima where Humboldt made some astronomical observations. On a sea voyage from Callao in Peru to Guayaquil in Ecuador, he measured the temperature of the ocean water and for the first time described the movement of ocean water, including the upwelling of the cold water from below. He named this the Peruvian current. In 1803, both sailed from Guayaquil to the Mexican port of Acapulco.

In 1804, they reached Havana, Cuba, but there Humboldt was pained to see the deplorable condition of the slaves and the deteriorating socio­economic conditions of Cuba. He deplored the racial gradations among men, prevalent in Cuba, which he described as unkind and inhuman.

Earlier, he was much upset by the social inequities which he observed in Prussia, and now he was pained to see the deteriorating condition of the human race, vis- a-vis the slave trade in Cuba. These observations about the quality and condition of the human race led Humboldt to vigorously maintain the concept of the ‘unity of the human race.’

They reached Philadelphia in 1804. There they visited the American Philosophical Society and then started for Washington by way of Baltimore. At Washington, Humboldt had the opportunity to meet Thomas Jafferson, the American geographer whose interest in the geographical research had already been known.

Both became close friends. Humboldt was very influenced by the liberal ideas of Jefferson. On June 1804, he and Bonpland sailed for Bordeaux. On returning to France in 1804, Humboldt lived in Paris until 1827. It was in Paris that Humboldt wrote the 30 volumes of the results of his expeditions and explorations to the Spanish colonies.

Publications of Results of American Expeditions:

The publications of the results of his expeditions in 30 volumes are included under the general title Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du Nouveau continent. Humboldt’s books provided the reports of careful scientific investigation, the seeking of answers to question about the inter­connections among the phenomena grouped together in rich diversity on the face of the Earth.

He was always concerned with the areal associations of natural and organic phenomena. In handling of selected natural phenomena, he invariably turned to their distribution and their impact on the spatial arrangement of other phenomena.

Humboldt’s ‘Relation historique’ had profound impact on the contemporary world. It usually dealt with his own experiences and hardships, provided report on scientific problems which had been investigated, and on the results achieved. In vol. 27, he distinguished between the distribution of individual plant species and the numerical association of plants in particular areas. He examined the numerical distribution of plants in different isothermal zones.

In this volume, he presented a synthesis of his detailed findings as a basis for the study of plant geography. He was also the first to divide the regions he explored in the Spanish colonies in Latin America, into botanical provinces, maps of which were published in his Atlas, Geographique du Nouveau Continent, which came out in 1814-19.

Humboldt’s ‘Essai Politique Sur Ie Royaume de la Nouvelle Espange’ (vols. 25-26) appears to have introduced a new period of regional geography because he attempted to recognise the interdependence of areal phenomena and the need for explaining any set of spatially distributed phenomena in relation to their spatial content. The book dealt with the resources and products of New Spain (or Mexico) in relation to population and political conditions.

Humboldt was moved by the far greater prosperity of New Spain (or Mexico) than the countries of northern South America. His interpretation of this difference was based on the theory that the only proper way to increase the general prosperity of a country depended on the rational utilisation of the natural resources, and New Spain (or Mexico) seemed to have done it effectively.

His conclusion was based on the availability of the well organised statistical data he found in Mexico. Humboldt is said to have suggested that a canal should be dug across the Isthmus of Central America and that the best place to do this would be in Panama.

The Essai Politique Sur L’Le de Cuba (published after 1826) is another regional monograph in which Humboldt attempted to explain the deplorable conditions of Cuba, and pointed out that elimination of slavery and an effective use of natural resources would help Cuba recover from the socio-economic hardships.

He outlined the fact that the phenomena arising out of the slavery and lack of effective utilisation of the available resources in Cuba were inter-connected spatially to create such a state of socio-economic uncertainty there.

Russian Expedition and Generalisations:

Humboldt first went to St. Petersburg, and from St. Petersburg travelled on horseback through Kazan, Bogosloski, Tabolsk, Tara, Bersk, and Omsk and reached up to the borders of China. While returning he passed through Omsk, Orenburg and Astrakhan and made a survey of the coastal lowlands of the Caspian Sea.

Throughout his Russian expedition, he kept on taking observations of temperature and air pressure at different places, and ultimately deduced that temperatures varied at the same latitude in accordance with distance from the ocean. On return to St. Petersburg, he urged upon the Tsar to set up a network of weather stations at which weather data could be recorded regularly and in accordance with standard procedures to make the results comparable.

During his Siberian expedition, he wrote to a member of the Russian Government:

‘The Ural mountains are a true El Dorado, and I am confident from the analogy they present to the geological conformation of Brazil … that diamonds will be discovered in the gold and platinum washings of the Ural mountains’.

A few days’ later diamonds were found in the gold and platinum washing.

On the basis of the temperature data he collected from different weather stations set up by the Tsar, Humboldt constructed the first world map of average temperature in which he used lines to connect points of equal temperature, called isotherms. From a compilation of isothermal lines, he was able to demonstrate that near the equator they are parallel to it, but nearer the poles they spread north over the sea and south over the land and that they reach further north on the west coast of continents.

He also saw the need for seasonal isotherms. On the basis of the isothermal maps, Humboldt developed the concept of continentally that continental climates are warmer in summer and colder in winter than places near the oceans at the same latitude. Climates of islands and coasts differ from the centre of continents in that the islands have milder winters and colder summers than the coasts.

It was largely due to his Siberian expedition, which helped him to formulate generalisations about the climatic phenomena, that Humboldt probably introduced the term ‘climatology’ for the first time. To him, climatology deals with all variations of atmosphere—temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, winds, purity and degree of visibility.

He is also credited to have coined the term ‘perma-frost’ to describe the permanently frozen soil of Siberia. He is said to have expressed doubts over the idea of a universal Ice Age which was developed by the Swiss scholar, Louis Aggasiz.

Geographical Concepts:

Geography, according to Humboldt, was the means of comprehending ‘the harmonious unity of the cosmos’ as a living whole, ‘a unity of multiplicity’. Insight into the cosmic organism creates a spiritual enjoyment and an inner freedom which even under fate’s hard blows cannot be destroyed by external power. Humboldt’s concept of geography was basically the same as of Ritter’s.

In an early work (Flora Fribergenis), he briefly touched upon the limits of the various sciences and distinguished between ‘Physiographia’ (the systematic natural sciences), ‘Naturgeschichte (natural history) where the emphasis was on the development of things in time, and ‘Geognosie’ or ‘Weltbeschreibung’, which discussed spatial distribution. The science of spatial distribution thus established was not limited to the Earth’s surface; it was not a description of the Earth but of the world, i.e. a science of the cosmos.

Humboldt points out – ‘the uncommon but definite expression of the science of the Cosmos recalls to the mind of the inhabitant of the Earth that we are treating of a more widely extended horizon; of the assemblage of all things with which space is filled.

From the remotest nebulae to the climatic distribution of those delicate tissues of vegetable matter which spreads a variegated covering over the surface of our rocks … if scientific terms had not long been diverted from their signification, the present work ought rather to have borne the title Cosmography divided into Uranography and Geography’.

Uranography was descriptive astronomy dealing with the celestial part of cosmos. Geography, or physical geography, dealt with the terrestrial part. Its ultimate aim was ‘to recognise unity in the vast diversity of phenomena, and by the exercise of thought and the combination of observations, to discern the constancy of phenomena in the midst of apparent changes’.

The Humboldtian geography seems to reflect the Kantian concept of geography, but there is no evidence of Kant being quoted by Humboldt. However, the question normally arises: to what extent is his thought derived from Kant? Humboldt’s Flora Fribergenis was published nine years before Kant’s lectures on geography, but Humboldt was so acquainted with Kant’s philosophy and scientific opinions from the age of sixteen onwards that it is highly probable that he had some notion of Kant’s concept of geography before he wrote the Flora.

Whatever the actual facts, it was the Kantian concept of geography that Humboldt held and which he expounded in Cosmos. He was also influenced by the philosophical approach of Rousseau which dealt with the descriptions of ‘the harmonies of nature’, and which had profound effect on Humboldt’s philosophical foundation.

It is assumed that Kant’s logical classification of knowledge made room for the specialist in the study of particular processes without reference to time or space. That this was a generally accepted division of the world of scholarship and not an invention of Kant is made clear by Humboldt’s earlier studies (1793) of the subterranean plants in the mines at Freiberg. In the introduction to this monograph, he pointed out that he was not studying plants as such, but rather the plants in relation to their surroundings.

Humboldt strongly held the idea of the unity of human race, ‘a concept which he further developed and strengthened, and manifested his concern about the deteriorating human condition both at home and abroad, especially in Cuba’.

The degeneration of Christianity by great wealth was a great socio-economic phenomenon that seemed to have rocked the continent much earlier and which persisted even during his time. The opposite ‘hypothesis of racial gradations among men’ he characterized as ‘not only unkind but also false’.

Humboldt believed that all the races of humankind had a common origin and that no race was necessarily inferior to others; all races, he insisted, were equally destined for freedom, individually or in groups. In his master work, the Cosmos, he remarked- ‘We wish to note our idea which is visible in ever-increasing validity through the whole of history…the idea of humanity to treat the whole of humanity, without considerations of religion, nationality and color as one great closely related race, as one whole existing for the attainment of one purpose, the free development of inner powers’.

Although ‘Humboldt’s thesis would find more support among the anthropologists than that on which Frobel as well as Peschel based their criticism, the criticism itself was essentially justified, his views on the question were strongly influenced by non- scientific consideration’.

To Humboldt, the concept of unity of nature presumed a causal interrelation of all the individual features in nature. The phenomena of nature were studied in order to establish this coherence and unity. For him, it was axiomatic that the unity of nature included the organic as well as inorganic, human as well as non-human, material as well as immaterial. The exclusion of any part would be not only arbitrary, but would destroy the coherence and unity of the whole.

Humboldt remarked:

‘My attention will ever be directed to observing the harmony among the forces of nature, to remarking the influence exerted by inanimate creation upon the animal and vegetable kingdom.’

He further continued:

‘Nature, considered rationally, that is to say submitted to the process of thought, is a unity in diversity of phenomena, a harmony blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes, one great whole animated by the breath of life. The most important result of a rational inquiry into nature is therefore to establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force, and matter, to determine with impartial justice what is due to the discoveries of the past and to those of the present, and to analyse the individual parts of the natural phenomena without succumbing beneath the weight of the whole’.

To establish this unity, the relationships of organic life (including man) to the inorganic surface of the Earth must be investigated. For Humboldt, this unity of nature was teleological, anthropocentric unity—he wrote of the comprehension of ‘the inner, secret play of natural forces’, where Ritter spoke of discovering the ‘divine secrets’—but was a balanced unity of the whole of nature, of which man was a part.

An important factor in the evolution of Humboldt’s thought was close personal relationship with Goethe. With him, and with the entire generation of the ‘romanticists’ (in the widest sense), Humboldt shared the idea of an organic coherence of all phenomena. It was through Goethe that he received the concept of the ‘Landschaft’ as conceived by the ‘romantic’ movement.

He shared the concept with Hegel that envisaged the Earth as an inseparable organic whole, all parts of which were mutually interdependent. This was the concept of the physical world or the field of moral philosophy, the Earth and the universe, in so far as accessible to the senses, as opposed to the view of humankind’s inner world or the field of moral philosophy.

This synthesis Humboldt regarded as a harmonious unity, a living whole of all parts. He derived aesthetic satisfaction through the scientific analysis of the ways in which things and phenomena on the Earth’s surface depended upon each other, an idea which runs right through the Cosmos and was clearly in his mind as early as 1797 as the physique du mode. His field of inquiry was the observable world of phenomena, ‘the total impression’.

Humboldt did not pursue idealism as far as Ritter, for his concept of the unity of nature was more aesthetic than religious. In the writings of Rousseau and St. Pierre, it was the descriptions of the harmonies of nature that appealed to him very much and through Goethe he learnt of the concept of the ‘Landschaft’ as conceived by the Romantic Movement. To Humboldt, every part of the world was a reflection of the unity of the whole.

In the handling of his multitudinous observations, Humboldt demonstrated far more clearly than Ritter the value of comparative geography. The essay on ‘Steppes and Deserts’ in Views of Nature, is full of comparisons of steppes and ocean, of all the steppes – of the world, the heaths of central Europe, Llanos, Pampas, North American prairies, African desert, central Asiatic steppes—all are compared so as to bring out the peculiar character or physiognomy of each as determined by diversity of soil, climate and elevation above the sea.

He attempted to compare his every new observation with previous new observation of similar kind and thus recorded similarities and differences. His object was not simply to measure one kind of phenomenon, but to bring out the ways in which the variety of observable phenomena of the landscape are associated and interconnected with each other at different places. This was the essence of his concept. Humboldt combined this comparative method with exceptionally sharp observation and thus deduced by objective descriptions of observations of nature.

‘The Cosmos’:

Humboldt would be known for his book, the Cosmos, which be produced during the last years of his life. The first two volumes were published in German in 1845 and 1847, the third and fourth in 1850 and 1858, and the fifth was published posthumously in 1862.

Written in superb literary style, the Cosmos became the most prestigious scientific work ever produced up to that time. It put together in one unified work all the various interests and discoveries of Humboldt’s life time.

The first volume of the Cosmos provides a general presentation of the whole picture of the universe. The second volume begins with a discussion of the portrayal of nature through the ages by landscape painters and by poets and then continues with a history of humankind’s effort to discover and describe the Earth since the time of the ancient Egyptians. The third volume deals with the laws of celestial space, i.e. astronomy. The fourth volume deals with the Earth, not only with geophysics, but also with man.

In the introduction of the Cosmos one reads:

‘The most important aim of all physical science is this – to recognise unity in diversity, to comprehend all the single aspects as revealed by the discoveries of the last epochs, to judge single phenomena separately without surrounding to their bulk, and to grasp nature’s essence under the cover of outward appearances….The purpose of this introductory chapter is to indicate the manner in which natural science can be endowed with a higher purpose through which all phenomena and energies are revealed as one entity pulsating with inner life. Nature is not dead matter, but she is the sacred and primary force’.

The philosophy of the Cosmos comprises four main themes:

1. The definition and limitation of a physical description of the world as a special and separate discipline;

2. The objective content, which is the actual and empirical aspects of nature’s entity in the scientific form of a portrait of nature;

3. The action of nature studies through media such as travel descriptions, poetry, landscape painting, and the display of contrasting groups of exotic plants; and

4. The history of natural philosophy and the gradual emergence of concepts pertaining to the cosmos as an organic unit.

Humboldt seemed to have been impressed by the natural philosophy founded by Schelling, as he felt the need for something better and higher to which everything could be referred. He was convinced that ‘a true natural philosophy could not harm empirical research’; on the contrary, ‘such a philosophy leads findings back to principles and is likewise the foundation for new findings’.

Humboldt’s special treatment to Schelling’s natural philosophy finds expression in his Cosmos. Humboldt described man as a part of nature.

He remarked:

‘The general picture of nature which I have endeavoured to delineate, would be incomplete, if I did not venture to trace a few of the most marked features of the human race, considered with reference to physical gradations to the geographical distribution of contemporaneous types, to the influence exercised upon man by the forces of nature, and the reciprocal, although weaker, action which he in his turn exercises on these natural forces.

Dependent, although in a lesser degree than plants and animals; on the soil, and on the meteorological processes of the atmosphere with which he is surrounded—escaping more readily from the control of natural forces by activity of mind, and the advance of intellectual cultivation, no less than by his wonderful capacity of adapting himself to all climates—man everywhere becomes most essentially associated with terrestrial life’. Humankind was thus considered as an element in the balance of the physical world and his capacities allowed him to contemplate with aesthetic satisfaction.

Humboldt’s Cosmos is a monument of compilation and in it are embodied the conclusions drawn from a lifetime of travel and diligent research. The method of presentation consists of the art of collecting and arranging a mass of isolated facts and rising thence by a process of induction to general ideas.

Humboldt’s Cosmos was one of the earliest modern attempts to provide a theoretical conception capable of systematising scientific knowledge about humankind and nature in geographical terms. For all its Kantian trappings, it spoke directly to Comte’s Ie reel and Ie relative.

Systematic Geography:

Humboldt categorised the knowledge of the natural or physical phenomena into three categories:

1. First were the phenomena examined taxonomically as form and content that is phenomena which were categorised according to analogous characteristic such as botany, zoology and geology. These were the systematic sciences.

2. Second, there were the historical sciences dealing with existing groups of phenomena— the history of the development of animals, plants and rocks.

3. Third, there was geography or Earth science, which Humboldt defined as Erdkunde, or physical geography. This is concerned with the distribution or arrangement of phenomena on the Earth’s surface. This is the study of phenomena in their spatial distribution and spatial relationship and interdependence.

Humboldt pointed out that in order to establish the unity of the total cosmos, it seemed more important to make systematic studies of particular kinds of phenomena in their interrelations in areas, than to prepare complete studies of individual areas. His effort to cover the whole of ‘physical geography’ in the Cosmos, demonstrated this view.

In the first volume of the Cosmos, Humboldt described physical geography as the study of ‘that which exists already (im Raume) together; it studies phenomena as arranged in areas in their mutual relation to all other phenomena with which they form a natural whole’.

Thus it included all Earth phenomena, organic and inorganic. It was the inter-connection of different categories of phenomena which made the systematic studies much more intrinsic to understand the natural whole.

Humboldt distinguished between natural sciences and geography. Natural sciences which include physical and biological sciences, according to him, were concerned with Earth phenomena— study the forms, construction and processes of individual animals, plants, solid objects or fossils and seek to arrange these in classes and families according to their internal analogies.

Geography, on the other hand, was concerned with these objects as they exist together, and related to each other causally in an area. In contrast with physics or botany, in which the objects of nature were divided according to kinds of objects, Humboldt pointed out that geography regarded all the objects as a natural whole as they stood in areal connection, in part with the Earth body, in part with the universe.

He recognised that to comprehend a whole consisting of a multitude of things and their interrelation, it was necessary to understand first the relation of some of the things to all others. Humboldt concentrated on particular classes of phenomena—particular vegetation—in relation to all other phenomena in areas.

The development of plant geography required the combination of means of measuring elevation and temperature with a knowledge of plants, and had been delayed until the methods of the physicists could be combined with those of the botanists.

Humboldt pointed out that though a systematic study in geography must be focused on one category of objects, it was in no sense to be restricted to the objects of that category, but was to consider those objects in their relationship to other geographic phenomena. Though at various places in his writings, he presents brief systematic considerations in anthropological geography, his studies in systematic geography were primarily limited to non-human geography.

Humboldt’s contribution to the development of systematic geography is therefore to be found not only in the value of the works which he produced, but also in the fact that he first clearly portrayed the distinction between systematic and regional, but chronological studies in geography and systematic studies in spatial sciences.

The fact that, rather than attempting systematic studies in the spatial fields, he maintained the chronological point of view enabled him to establish several branches of systematic geography, notably climatology and plant geography.

Regional Geography:

Humboldt can also be described as a regionalist, for his description of areas seemed to have initiated a new period in regional geography. He recognised the interdependence of areal phenomena and the need for explaining any one set of spatially distributed phenomena in relation to their spatial content. His ‘Essai politique sur Ie Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne’ and ‘Essai politique sur I’ ile de Cuba’, are the two major works which raised geography to a scientific status in the regional description.

These regional descriptions and studies reflect Humboldt’s interest in natural condition (which he considered subordinate to socio-economic condition) and much of the material cannot be included in geography as they dealt with political economies.

However, the manner in which Humboldt analysed the differences in economic, social and political condition of different areas in relation to the differences in natural conditions was followed neither by economists or political scientists, but by geographers who made this form of regional study one of the functions of geography. Humboldt made significant contribution to regional economic geography which was based on the empirically observed facts.

He described in detail about Mexico and Cuba which he visited and so was able to provide a relatively complete picture. He not only considered each of the significant features of an area, but combined their individual characteristics for each distinctive part of the area, then showing the relation of the different parts of the area in the total. However, Humboldt’s regional geography was not anthropocentric because the human factors appeared to be subordinated to the natural factors.

Methods and Approach:

Humboldt emphasised the need for careful observation of nature in the field and for the careful and precise measurement of observations. He outlined the importance of the empirical method of research.

He pointed out:

‘I limit myself to the domain of empirical ideas. Facts remain; even the hastily erected edifice of the theory has long fallen into ruins. I have always kept my facts distinct from my conjectures. This method of dealing with the phenomena of nature appears to be the one best grounded and most likely to succeed’.

‘One of the first (and most precocious) attempts to qualify geography’s commitment to the classical models of Baconian empiricism was Humboldt’s Cosmos, but despite its incorporation of elements of Kant’s transcendental idealism Humboldt remained, like so many of his predecessors and his heirs, a strong advocate of inductive approach.’

Over one hundred years later, the quantitative revolution continued to strengthen the hold of inductivism, and still more recently it has received a new impetus from the development of spatial techniques whose auto- projective methods can be sub seemed within the inductive-statistical model.

Undoubtedly, Humboldt was the last of the great polymaths. He mastered a number of disciplines and put all his energy into travel and research in order to understand the areal associations of diverse categories of physical and human phenomena of the whole complex system of the universe. He is credited with having made geography an original and distinctive science, rather than a collection of facts from the physical and biological sciences. He appeared to have combined his aesthetic standpoint with a most critical scientific explanation to explain the natural whole.

He set forth a new paradigm which laid the scientific foundation to the contemporary geographical scholarship not only in Germany, but also in the whole of Europe. Humboldt may be described as an academician of versatile genius who had skilfully widened the knowledge and scope of the geographical horizon in the nineteenth century.

Humboldt may be identified with the introduction of reductionism in geography as he offered explanation in the Cosmos which sought to catalogue separately every facet of the physical environment and all the known facts of human distribution and activity about the places he visited in course of his expeditions. His studies in physical geography were specifically carried out using the methods of contemporary physical and biological sciences.