In a period roughly encompassing the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a handful of very young European men criss-crossed the world on ships and changed almost everything we think. The insights of these slightly annoying but beguiling individuals are, more than anything else, what make earlier historical periods seem so remote and have surely had a far more profound impact on how we see the world than, say, the French Revolution.
Generally in their 20s and exhibiting an almost mad degree of assurance, plausibility and vim, they beguiled committees, grizzled sea captains and patrons to take great risks and accommodate their often eccentric needs. Joseph Banks on the Endeavour, Georg Forster on the Resolution, Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Joseph Hooker on the Erebus, Thomas Huxley on the Rattlesnake seemed to have a hypersensitivity to the ideas around them and, excited by their exotic surroundings, brought these to bear on scientific issues which had in some cases not even been hitherto viewed as problems. Darwin can be seen as [???] Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus mixed [???] in with earthquakes, finches and coral atolls, just as Alexander von Humboldt takes Kant, Buffon and Goethe up the Andes and into the Orinoco. In each case, one can say that the ideas they brought back to Europe could not have been either conceived of or understood at any earlier date.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment