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Visit to America

Leaving from Cuba, Humboldt decided to to take an unplanned trip to the United States.  He sent a letter of introduction to Thomas Jefferson. The letter began by flattering the president and hinted at both his knowledge of Mexico, an area he knew Jefferson had considerable interest in after the recently completing the Louisiana Purchase, and his discovery of Mammoth Teeth. Jefferson warmly replied and invited him for a meeting at the White House. He first stopped at Philadelphia where he met with the American Philosophical Society, of which Jefferson was also president. He became a guest of honor at numerous occasions and achieved some level of celebrity among scientific society.

When he journeyed to Washington DC, he was welcomed and was able to supply Jefferson with the latest information on the population, trade agriculture and military of Mexico. This information would later be the basis for his Essay on the Political Kingdom of New Spain (1810). Jefferson was unsure of where the border of the newly purchased Louisiana was precisely and Humboldt wrote him a two page report on the matter. Jefferson would later refer to Humboldt as “the most scientific man of the age”. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the treasury said of Humboldt, “I was delighted and swallowed more information of various kinds in less than two hours than I had for two years past in all I had read or heard.” After leaving DC, he wrote to Secretary of State James Madison and said he would supply him all the information he could on the possibility of building a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific.

Friendship with Goethe

Goethe and Humboldt soon became close friends. Goethe had developed his own extensive theories on comparative anatomy. Working before Darwin, he believed that animals had a an internal force, an urform, that gave them a basic shape and then they were further adapted to their environment by an external force. Humboldt urged him to publish his theories. Together the two discussed and expanded these ideas.

Humboldt would often return to Jena in the years that followed. Goethe remarked about Humboldt to friends that he had never met someone so versatile. Humboldt's drive served as an inspiration for Goethe. In 1797, Humboldt returned to Jena for three months. During this time Goethe moved from his residence in Wiemar to reside in Jena. Together Humboldt and Goethe would attend university lectures on anatomy and conduct their own experiments. One experiment involved hooking up a frog leg to various metals. They found no effect until the moisture of Humboldt's breath triggered a reaction that caused the frog leg to leap off the table. Humboldt would describe this as one of his favorite experiments because it was as if he was "breathing life into" the leg.

During this visit, a thunderstorm killed a farmer and his wife. Humboldt obtained their corpses and analyzed them in the anatomy tower of the university.

The Invention of Nature. Alexander von Humboldt's New World

The Invention of Nature. Alexander von Humboldt's New World is a non fiction book released in 2015 by the historian Andrea Wulf about the Prussian naturalist, explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt. The book follows Humboldt from his early childhood and travels through Europe to his journey through Latin America and his return to Europe. Wulf makes the case that Humboldt synthesised from many different fields a new vision of nature that would go on to influence scientists, activists and the public.

Reception

Invention of Nature became a New York Times bestseller. The book was well received among critics as well, albeit with some complaining that the book could have covered Humboldt more thoroughly instead of focusing on people he influenced. Mathew Price of the Boston Globe wrote, "Wulf knows her subject well, but her book, divided between a biography of his life and sections tracing his influence on Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and others, sometimes feels disjointed." Simon Winder of the Gaurdian voiced a similar opinion, "the book does have its frustrations. It is not very long, but more than a quarter of it consists of potted accounts of other people’s debts to Humboldt (Simon Bolivar, Darwin, John Muir and others), at the expense of material on the man himself." Nathaniel Rich of the New York Review of Books compared Wulf's book favorably to previous biographies saying, "Wulf offers a more urgent argument for Humboldt’s relevance. The Humboldt in these pages is bracingly contemporary".

Declining fame among the American public

In 1869, the 100^th year of his birth, Humboldt’s fame was so great that cities all over America celebrated his birth with large festivals. In New York City, a bust of his head was unveiled in Central Park.

Scholars have speculated about the reasons for Humboldt's declining renown among the the public. Sandra Nichols has argued that there are three reasons for this. First, a trend towards specialization in scholarship. Humboldt was a generalist who connected many disciplines in his work. Today, academics have become more and more focused on narrow fields of work.  Humboldt combined ecology, geography and even social sciences. Second, a change in writing style. Humboldt’s works, which were considered essential to a library in 1869, had flowery prose that fell out of fashion. One critic said they had a “laborious picturesqueness”. Humboldt himself said that, “If I only knew how to describe adequately how and what I felt, I might, after this long journey of mine, really be able to give happiness to people. The disjointed life I lead makes me hardly certain of my way of writing”. Third, a rising anti-German sentiment in the late 1800s and the early 1900’s due to heavy German immigration to the United States and later World War 1.^[207]