1 Research for this paper was supported by a grantfrom the Australian Research Council. Manuscriptaccepted IS January 1998.

2 Department of History and Philosophy of Science,University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052,Australia.

ON 8 JANUARY 1870, the German geographerAugust Petermann wrote from Gotha toFerdinand von Mueller in Australia a letterof introduction for the son of the BritishConsul-General at Hamburg. The father,Petermann wrote to Mueller, was "one of thebest friends of German Geographers andScientific men, ... who therefore will be sureto receive the sympathy of so great a patriotas yourself." Hence he was confident thatMueller, "in his position as the Humboldt ofAustralia," would make the son welcome(petermann 1870).

Some years later, in a letter dated 16 De­cember 1874, Petermann again used this im­agery. On that occasion, Petermann thankedMueller for instructing his protege, the ex­plorer Ernest Giles, to name in Petermann'shonor a prominent mountain range he haddiscovered in Central Australia: "At the firstopportunity I have to put new names on themap," he told Mueller, "you may be surethat I shall not forget that of my high patronin the Antipodes, my revered AustralianHumboldt, and shall also think of the oblig­ing Mr Giles" (Voigt 1996: 127). It is notclear whether Petermann lived up to hispromise. Earlier, in 1871, he had named amountain on Spitzbergen after Mueller

Pacific Science (1998), vol. 52, no. 4: 294-300© 1998 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved

Humboldtian Imagery and "the Humboldt of Australia"!

R. W. HOME2

ABSTRACT: When the great German geographer August Petermann calledthe botanist/explorer Ferdinand von Mueller "the Humboldt of Australia,"what did he have in mind? Elaborating the circumstances of his doing so givesus a new view of Alexander von Humboldt's image among nineteenth-centuryscientists who declared themselves to be his followers and raises the question ofhow closely this might have corresponded with the notion of "Humboldtianscience" that has been developed by present-day historians of science.

(Voigt 1996: 103); but there is no reference inthe surviving correspondence to his laterdoing anything like that again. (There is acataract in Brazil named after Mueller thatmight perhaps have been given its name byPetermann, but I have been unable to tracethe circumstances of its naming.)

Petermann's coupling of Mueller's namewith that of the German polymath Alexandervon Humboldt provides the central themeof this paper. It has become commonplaceamong historians to represent much ofnineteenth-century science as "Humboldt­ian." And here we have one leading scientistapplying the very label, not once but twice toone of his colleagues! My intention is to usewhat we know of the work of Mueller andPetermann, and of the connection betweenthem, to elucidate Petermann's usage-toshed new light upon Humboldt's influenceamong his contemporaries and successors.

It is clear that Petermann intended tocompliment Mueller. But if his linking ofthe two names were to flatter, he had to besure that Mueller would see the connectionas appropriate as well as pleasing. Thisprompts a question. Given the differencesbetween the patrician Humboldt, securelylocated throughout his career at the heart ofthe intellectual world of the nineteenth cen­tury, and Mueller, the orphaned son of aRostock customs official who had emigratedto distant Australia in 1847 and stayed thereever since, what parallels could Petermannpossibly have had in mind, that he couldexpect Mueller also to recognize? What does

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"The Humboldt of Australia"-HOME

his comparison say about his image ofHumboldt, and of Mueller? And what doesit tell us about "Humboldtian" science, as thisterm might have been understood at the time?

I add this qualification because SusanFaye Cannon has offered a characterizationof "Humboldtian" science that has attractedconsiderable attention among historians ofnineteenth-century scientific thought (Can­non 1978: ch. 3). This style of science, she hasargued, was "the great new thing in profes­sional science in the first half of the 19thcentury." Not for Humboldtians the easygeneralizations of the casual observer, northe "sterile accumulation of insulated facts"in the laboratory. On the contrary, Hum­boldtian science demanded careful and sys­tematic recording of a range of variablesin the hope that these could eventually beshown to be linked together as differentaspects of large-scale (or even global) dy­namical systems. The Humboldtian traveleralways looked for relationships between phe­nomena; a trademark was the plotting oflines ("iso-lines") representing equal valuesof some physical variable or other on maps.Precision, whether of observation or of mea­surement, was a sine qua non.

Other authors have subsequently elabo­rated Cannon's idea. In particular, MalcolmNicolson has highlighted the importance ofbotany, Mueller's science, in Humboldt'sscheme of things (Nicolson 1987). WhatHumboldt advocated was not, however, thebotany of Linnaeus, with its focus on taxon­omy, but rather a botany that studied vege­tation as a whole-that is, the relationshipswithin and between plant communities. TheHumboldtian botanist, on this account, is aplant geographer, concerned not so much todiscover and identify new species-althoughthis remained an important part of thetask-but to explore the distribution ofspecies and the connections between plantdistribution and variables such as climate,elevation, and geological structure. Morerecently, Michael Dettelbach has suggestedyet another feature of Humboldtianism,namely a determination to bring remote anduncivilized parts of the world under scientificlaw and order. "Contributing to Humboldt's

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lines," he suggested, "was a philanthropic,even heroic act. ... To extend the reach ofmean values was to extend European civili­zation in its best and most progressive as­pect" (Dettelbach 1996:301).

THE AUSTRALIAN HUMBOLDT

Humboldt's influence is apparent amongmany German scientists who traveled toAustralia in the nineteenth century (Home1995a,b). Mueller was perhaps the most no­table of these, and he acknowledged a strongHumboldtian influence on his choice of ca­reer-recalling in later life how, during hisstudent days, he was inspired by Humboldt'saccount of his travels in South America(Mueller 1887). Mueller was the principalspeaker at a commemoration of Humboldt'slife and work held in Melbourne on 14 Sep­tember 1859, shortly after the great man'sdeath; there he recorded how his readingof Humboldt's inspiring vision of an exact,unified science embracing nature in all itsaspects had given direction to his life(Mueller 1859a). Under Humboldt's influ­ence, the highest task was no longer to perfectindividual disciplines, but rather "to explorethe inner connection of the sciences, to dis­cover their reciprocal relations, and therebyto extend the whole empire of knowledgesimultaneously." The period in which helived would thus be reckoned "the epochin which the isolated scientific explana­tion was merged into a harmonious whole"(Mueller 1859a: 20). Mueller included a quo­tation from Humboldt's Cosmos on the titlepage of his first major Australian publication(Mueller 1860-1862), and in a letter, he re­ferred to Humboldt as "the greatest genius ofthis century" (Mueller 1859b). Late in life,Mueller was still espousing the Humboldtiancreed: "the greatest triumph of sciences," hemaintained in his presidential address to theAustralasian Association for the Advance­ment of Science in 1890, "consists in bringingthem into the fullest contact, somewhat inan Aristotelean and Plinian-or speaking ofour own epoch-in an Humboldtian spirit"(Mueller 1890: 5).

These points are revealing in the way they

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emphasize the dream of unifying the sciencesto embrace the Earth in all its aspects. Thetheme of the quotation Mueller extractedfrom Cosmos-"everywhere presses upon usthe sense of the existence of Nature accordingto inner, eternal laws" CUberall durchdringtuns das Gefiihl des Bestehens der Natur nachinnern ewigen Gesetzen)-was of a piece withthis idea, because it was these very "inner,eternal laws" that would emerge. However,having introduced the theme, what Muellerstressed in his 1859 address-by far his mostextensive discussion of Humboldt's work­was the breadth of the great man's interestsas displayed in his achievements as a scientificexplorer. Mueller highlighted the romance ofHumboldt's South American journey, notingthe rich variety of tropical nature, the majestyof the Andes, the drama of an eruption ofCotopaxi, and Humboldt's ascent of Chim­borazo. He listed Humboldt's comments onearthquakes and on the pyramids built by theIncas, his scientific survey of Mexico, and hisvisit to the United States. He also recountedHumboldt's later travels in Siberia. But itwas the scientific character of Humboldt'sjourneys that in Mueller's mind set themapart from the travels of others. This, hesaid, "inspired me too to undertake inves­tigations in the kingdom of nature, drove metoo with endless longing into the far distance,in order to carry to the great master someperhaps valuable building stones for the palaceof science" (Mueller 1859a). In this, Muellerperceived a moral benefit. Humboldt's greatestreward had been "to see, even during his life­time, the strength of his influence in advancingthe well-being and in the raising up of man­kind, and to have called such a crowd of greatminds to further research in all parts of theEarth" (Mueller 1859a).

Petermann and Mueller never met, butthey exchanged letters for many years. Theirsurviving correspondence has recently beenpublished (Voigt 1996). The earliest letterlocated dates from 1861, when Mueller sentPetermann a donation of £20 to the fundestablished to mount an expedition to searchfor the German explorer Eduard Vogel,missing in Africa; it seems that this was thefirst letter in the series. (Voigt reported,

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however, that there had been earlier, indirectcontact through Mueller's Hamburg friend,the botanist Otto Wilhelm Sonder, who on atleast two occasions had forwarded publica­tions to Petermann on Mueller's behalf.)

Mueller was a much more regular corre­spondent than Petermann: indeed, for longperiods he made a point of writing to Peter­mann every month. Petermann's survivingletters to Mueller, on the other hand, aremuch less numerous and almost invariablyinclude an apology for not having writtenmore often. It is, however, clear from Muel­ler's acknowledgment that Petermann wasalso, and much more regularly, sendingMueller copies of his publications, includingissues of the journal that he edited, hisGeographische Mittheilungen. Mueller in re­turn sent Petermann a range of Australianpublications, including his own; and fromthe more geographically orientated of these,Petermann often included excerpts in hisjournal and also extracted details that he in­corporated in the maps he was constantlyproducing.

What is the image of Mueller that Peter­mann acquired from these contacts? I haveto say that, judging from Mueller's botanicalworks, Petermann would have had fewgrounds to attribute to Mueller the "Hum­boldtian" vision described by Cannon andNicolson. By the late 1850s, after Mueller'sremarkable success as botanist on AugustusGregory's North Australia Exploring Expe­dition, he was treated more or less as anequal by the leading botanists of Europe.However, most of his botanical work, andcertainly that on which his scientific reputa­tion chiefly rested, was straightforwardlytaxonomic in character. His publications in­cluded a plethora of separate papers describ­ing new species, the number and distributionof which created bibliographical problemsabout which Joseph Hooker complained evenin the 1850s-when what was later to becomea flood, was still only a trickle. Petermannmay have come across some of these, butprobably only a small and random sample.Then there was Mueller's personal botanicaljournal, his Fragmenta Phytographiae Aus­traliae, the first number of which appeared in

"The Humboldt of Australia"-HoME

1858 and which eventually grew into an 11­volume publication (Mueller 1858-1882).Mueller made sure that Petermann had a fullset. He likewise sent a copy of his Plants In­digenous to the Colony of Victoria (1860­1862) and also, beginning in 1863, volumes ofGeorge Bentham's Flora Australiensis, in thewriting of which Mueller played a crucial role.

A smaller work of Mueller's, The Vegeta­tion of the Chatham-Islands (1864), theonly other separately published work sentto Petermann before the comparison withHumboldt, did indicate by its title a larger,biogeographical purpose in its concern todescribe the plant community of these iso­lated islands southeast of New Zealand thatMueller himself never visited. However, fromthe actual contents of the book, this concernemerges only fleetingly and by implication,because in the main it is devoted to standardtaxonomic descriptions of the species repre­sented on the islands. Their interrelationshipsare only hinted at, and there is no discussionof either geology or climate.

From these works, Petermann would havebeen left in no doubt that Mueller was amajor figure in the taxonomic botany of hisday and a leading authority on the Austra­lian flora. In general terms, this would havebeen known to Petermann from other sourcesas well, for he had his own well-developedlinks with the leaders of British science, afterspending 10 years in Britain between 1844and 1854. But regardless of Mueller's stand­ing as a taxonomist, it could not have justi­fied Petermann's comparing him with Hum­boldt-indeed, had Petermann intended toflatter Mueller for his taxonomic work, com­paring him with Humboldt was not a veryappropriate choice. Even if, looking back, wecan see features of Mueller's work that fitwith Nicolson's characterization of Hum­boldtianism as it applied to botany, forPetermann to detect them from the mate­rials available to him, he would have had tobe a remarkably perceptive reader indeed.

Two aspects of Mueller's botany, in par­ticular, are consistent with Nicolson's re­quirements, though with respect to the first ofthem I speak only hesitantly. But I suspectthat we may attribute to Humboldt's influ-

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ence Mueller's strongly held commitment tothe view that field observations of livingplants should be a major consideration indetermining species. In this he was opposedby his great English cOIitemporary GeorgeBentham and also by others in the Kew tax­onomic tradition including Joseph Hooker.Bentham, for example, although acknowl­edging that field observation might be a usefulaid, cautioned that "it often acts as a snare"because it rarely happens that enough relatedspecies grow close enough together to permitthe kinds of comparisons that are possible inthe herbarium, leaving the field worker forcedto rely on "recollections of general impres­sions." Hooker concurred, writing to Muellerthat "Every Botanist who has come to Kew towork, however experienced, has confessedthat so large a Herbarium puts his materials &labors on a very different point of view fromwhat he expected" (quoted by Stevens 1997:353). In part, no doubt, Mueller's insistencewas a strategic response to Kew's claim ofultimate authority Over the Australian flora.But it was also much more than that. Thequestion has always been a matter of debateamong taxonomists. It seems to me that thestance Mueller took on the matter was prob­ably a reflection of the fact that his botanicalinterests extended beyond taxonomy to plantsas they occur in nature-that is, to Hum­boldtian concerns with vegetation.

On the second point, I can speak moredefinitely. During the early 1870s, Muellerbecame embroiled in a bitter dispute withlocal horticulturalists over his administrationof the Melbourne Botanic Garden-a dis­pute that ultimately led, in 1873, to his dis­missal from the directorship he had occupiedsince 1857. The dispute derived from the verydifferent views of botanical research held byMueller an.d his critics, and what the role of abotanic garden should be. In a recent paper,Stephen Jeffries argued persuasively thatMueller's position is best understood in termsof a commitment to a Humboldtian programof research that his critics simply failed torecognize (Jeffries 1997). The horticultur­alists, steeped in the traditions of Englishgardening and the Kew style of botany, be­lieved that Mueller's role as government bot-

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anist should be confined to the classificationof the local flora on the basis of the herbar­ium collections (his control over these beingin no way affected by his dismissal from theGarden). The role of the Botanic Garden, intheir view, was to raise plants for display.

Mueller, on the other hand, although notdiscounting the importance of taxonomicwork, sought in true Humboldtian fashion togo beyond this, to an understanding of therelationship between potentially useful plantsand their habitats, with the ultimate objectiveof assessing their suitability for acclimatiza­tion. Mueller saw the Botanic Garden as aprimarily scientific institution playing a cen­tral role in this research on plant culture.

There is no doubt that Mueller was dev­astated by his dismissal from the Garden andbelieved that his ability to undertake the kindof research he had been engaged to do hadbeen undermined. Jeffries showed how hewas able to maintain this view, even thoughthe years following his dismissal were, so faras his taxonomic work was concerned, themost productive of his whole career.

MUELLER AND liS MILIEU

There are, then, good reasons for classify­ing Mueller as a Humboldtian botanist ac­cording to the criteria established by Nicol­son, and for seeing Humboldtian ideals asintegral to his conception of his science.Nevertheless, Petermann would have gainedlittle if any inkling of Mueller's ideas onthese matters from his publications, nor didMueller address such matters in his letters tothe geographer. Indeed, Mueller's letters toPetermann were not concerned with tech­nical botanical issues at all.

We thus find ourselves confronting a par­adox: in terms of our current notions of whatconstituted a Humboldtian, Petermann wasright to link Mueller's name so strikinglywith the master-but he had no way ofknowing this. In fact, in comparing Muellerwith Humboldt, Petermann was almost cer­tainly referring to something else. And so itappears that the technical meaning we have

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given the term "Humboldtian," howeveruseful in historical analysis, might not coin­cide with nineteenth-century usage.

Petermann himself was, above all, inter­ested in geography, and this topic dominateshis correspondence with Mueller. As Euro­pean knowledge of the world increasedduring the middle decades of the nineteenthcentury, Petermann charted its progress inhis journal and on maps he prepared forthe publishing company that employed him,Justus Perthes Verlag in Gotha.

In the first letter he wrote to Mueller, afterthanking him for his donation toward theexpedition to search for Vogel, Petermannasked Mueller to keep him informed ongeographical developments in Australia. Hisletter gives a clear picture of how he built hisjournal. He complained that, isolated inGotha, he found it difficult to keep up withwhat was happening and asked Mueller tohelp him acquire the latest exploration re­ports as well as maps, statistical reports, andthe publications of local scientific societies, sothat he could disseminate them in his journal(Voigt 1996: 29-32). He received reports onthis basis from almost all the governments ofEurope and from those of Canada, the Unit­ed States, Brazil, and several other countries,but very few from Australia.

Mueller set to work at once, arranging forthe Survey Departments of the Australiancolonies to send Petermann copies of all themaps they had, and forwarding to him recentlypublished reports of exploring expeditions.Once established, the pattern continued, andMueller became a major conduit of the latestAustralian geographical news to Petermann.

Before his correspondence with Peter­mann, Mueller had established his credentialsas a scientific explorer in the Humboldtianmold, having on three separate occasionstraversed the rugged mountainous regionof southeastern Australia and served asbotanist on the highly successful expeditionto Northern Australia, led by AugustusGregory, that penetrated deep into the cen­tral desert before traveling 3000 miles over­land to Brisbane. Mueller botanized busilyall the way. Thereafter, he was justifiably re­garded as an authority on exploration, and

"The Humboldt of Australia"-HoME

his advice was sought by those planning ex­peditions. He became a great advocate andpatron of further exploration in inland Aus­tralia-whether in the vast western deserts;or in North Queensland, in search of thenaturalist-explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, whowith all his party had vanished without traceafter setting out in 1847 to cross the conti­nent from east to west. Mueller kept Peter­mann fully informed and so impressed himwith his standing as an explorer that when, in1863, Petermann published a map showingwhat was known of the south polar regionand an editorial advocating further explora­tion, he named Mueller as the man to take iton (Petermann 1863).

From Mueller's letters, Petermann wouldalso have learned that there was a romanticdimension. For several years in the 1860s,following the discovery in North Queenslandof a tree on which a large letter "L" wasblazed, Mueller promoted expeditions tosearch for Leichhardt. The blazed tree wasperhaps the first real clue to the route hehad taken. Mueller's enthusiasm was driven,he said in public lectures as well as in hisletters to Petermann, not just by a desire toknow what had happened to Leichhardt, butby the hope-a faint one, he admitted-thatsome of the missing men might still be alivebut marooned in a desert oasis from whichthey were unable to escape (Voigt 1996: 57­59).

There was also a moral dimension toMueller's enthusiasm, and this brings meback to Dettelbach's comments about themoral overtones of the Humboldtian enter­prise. So far as further exploration withinAustralia was concerned, Mueller repeatedlymade it clear that his enthusiasm was drivenby a desire to promote the economic expan­sion of the country. His support for the ex­peditions of Ernest Giles in the early 1870s,for example, in the frightful desert countrywest of the newly constructed north-southtelegraph line through Central Australia­support that extended to Mueller's commit­ting large sums of his own money to thecause-was driven not just by scientific curi­osity (Giles botanized for him whenever hecould, as he went along) but by a vision of

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opening up new stock routes between easternAustralia and the west coast. But both withinAustralia and in other parts of the world,Mueller also saw the penetration and colo­nizing of new territory as a special privilegethat had fallen to nineteenth-century Euro­peans, not one just of taming these lands bybringing them within the bounds of scientificunderstanding, but one also of carrying civi­lization to the barbarous peoples who in­habited them. The Germans, he thought, hadnot yet adequately done their duty in this re­spect, and he urged Petermann to use hisjournal to advocate German colonies inAbyssinia, New Guinea, and the islands ofthe South Pacific. He even chided Peter­mann at one point for promoting Germanexpeditions to the north pole rather than tosuch places where the civilizing mission wasmore obviously necessary (Voigt 1996: 98­99).

Although views such as these are consis­tent with those that Dettelbach has asso­ciated with Humboldtianism, it is unclearwhether either Mueller or Petermann wouldhave associated them particularly with Hum­boldt. I suspect that they have a muchbroader cultural basis than that. And so I amagain led to question whether there is muchconnection between our fairly precisely de­fined historical category of "Humboldtianscience" and Petermann's calling Mueller the"Humboldt of Australia"-even though, as Ihave argued, out technical definition fitsMueller's science.

Petermann's phrase was, I suggest, in­tended in a more general sense. Socially, itwas no longer as inappropriate as it oncewould have been, because Mueller had re­cently been given his "von" and then createda Freiherr by the King of Wurttemberg.Mueller was clearly a person with consider­able standing in his own field of science; hehad major achievements behind him as a sci­entific explorer;· and now he was inspiring anew generation of scientifically oriented ex­plorers to risk their lives elucidating the ge­ography and natural productions of vast,uncharted regions of inland Australia. Whenone comes to think about it, it wasn't such abad comparison after all.

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LITERATURE CITED

BENTHAM, G. 1863-1878. Flora australiensis.7 vols. London.

CANNON, S. F. 1978. Science in culture: Theearly Victorian period. Science HistoryPublications, New York.

DETTELBACH, M. 1996. Humboldtian science.Pages 287-304 in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord,and E. C. Spary, eds. Cultures of naturalhistory. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

HOME, R. W. 1995a. Humboldtian sciet;lcerevisited: An Australian case study. HISt.Sci. 33: 1-22.

---. 1995b. Science as a German exportto nineteenth-century Australia. Sir Rob­ert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies,London.

JEFFRIES, S. 1997. Alexander von Humboldtand Ferdinand von Mueller's argumentfor the scientific botanic garden. Hist.Rec. Aust. Sci. 11: 301-310.

MUELLER, F. J. H. 1858-1882. Fragmentaphytographiae australiae. 11 vols. Mel­bourne.

---. 1859a. Zur Humboldt-Feier inMelbourne: Rede von Herro Dr. Ferd.Muller. Melbourner Deutsche Zeitung. 30September, pages 20-21, and 21 October,pages 42-43.

---. 1859b. Letter to John Macadam, 14September 1859. Trans. Philos. Inst. Vic.4:xx.

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---. 1860-1862. The plants indigenous tothe colony of Victoria. 2 vols. Melbourne.

---. 1864. The vegetation of theChatham-Islands. Melbourne.

--. 1887. Unpublished letter to R. J. D.von Fischer-Benzon, 16 December 1887.Cb. 66, Handschriftenabteilung, Schles­wig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Kiel.

---. 1890. Presidential address. Pages 1­26 in Report of the second meeting ofthe Australasian Association for the Ad­vancement of Science, Melbourne, 1890.Melbourne.

NICOLSON, M. 1987. Alexander von Hum­boldt Humboldtian science and the ori­gins ~f the study of vegetation. Hist. Sci.25: 167-194.

PETERMANN, A. 1863. Petermanns Geog.Mittheilungen 9: 428.

---. 1870. Unpublished letter to F. vonMueller, 8 January 1870. Royal BotanicGardens, Melbourne.

STEVENS, P. F. 1991. J. D. Hooker, GeorgeBentham, Asa. Gray and FerdinandMueller on species limits in theory andpractice: A mid-nineteenth-century debat~

and its repercussions. Hist. Rec. Aust. SCI.11 :345-370.

VOIGT, J. H. 1996. Die Erforschung Austra­liens: Der Briefwechsel zwischen AugustPetermann and Ferdinand von Mueller,1861-1878. Justus Perthes Verlag, Gotha.