- Contents
- Why a “Romantic” Natural History?
- Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
- The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History
- The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature
- Additional Topics in Romantic Natural History
- Darwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images
- A Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859
- Natural Historians
- Spencer F. Baird
- Henry David Thoreau
- Charles Darwin
- Louis Agassiz
- John D. Godman
- Adam Sedgwick
- Geoffray St. Hilaire
- William Smith
- Georges Cuvier
- Alexander von Humboldt
- Benjamin Rush
- Jean Lamarck
- William Paley
- Thomas Jefferson
- William Bartram
- Joseph Priestley
- Erasmus Darwin
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Gilbert White
- George-Louis Buffon
- Carolus Linnaeus
- Literary Figures
- Letitia Landon
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- John Keats
- John Clare
- Felicia Hemans
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Lord Byron
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- William Wordsworth
- Ann Radcliffe
- Robert Burns
- William Blake
- Charlotte Smith
- Anna Laetitia Barbauld
- William Cowper
- Thomas Warton
- Christopher Smart
- Thomas Gray
- Thomas Beddoes
- James Thomson
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Robert Browning
- John Dyer
- Topics
- Temple of Nature (1803)
- Dorothy Wordsworth
- Fossils
- Geologist Poets
- Rhinos, Crocs and other Monsters
- Global Exploration
- Amphibious Thinking
- Poetry Lab with Dr. Frankenstein
- Galvani’s Electric Romanticism
- Frog Fish from Surinam
- Boundary between Plant and Animal
- Mimosa: The Sensitive Plant
- The Venus Fly Trap and the Great Chain of Being
- Humans as a species of Animal
- Monkeys, Men and Apes
- Jardine’s Natural History of Monkeys
- Human Monsters and Reproductive Mysteries
- Human Taxonomy
- Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature
- Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein Mistake
- James King Davidson’s Journal
- Zoos as a 19th Century Spectacle
- Mammoths and Mastodons
- Fontana on the Venom of the Viper
- Celestial Bodies
- Coleridge on Plants and Animals
- Baird Report as Curator of Museum
- Artists & Illustrators
- Bibliography
- Tags

Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt from"Climb Chimborazo and See the World" by Peter J. Bowler Science (10/4/2002)
Alexander von Humboldt was a natural historian, geographer and explorer who was the first European to travel widely in Central and South America with the intention of describing the flora and fauna of this hitherto unrecorded region. He was also the first geographer to notice the obvious similarity between the eastern coastline of South America and the western coastline of Africa, thus suggesting the theory of plate tectonics for which he was widely ridiculed until the twentieth century. Humboldt was a remarkable polymath, known for his careful observations and discoveries relating to subjects as wide ranging as chemistry, mineralogy, forestry, astronomy, oceanography and global magnetism. He appropriately entitled his most well read and widely-known work The Cosmos (five volumes, 1845-62). His traveling companion in South America was Aimé Bonpland, a botanist who described over 6,000 new plants on their journey; they collected a total of 60,000. Humboldt returned home by way of the United States, where he met Thomas Jefferson, also well known by then as a natural scientist, and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. His final voyage was a journey to the Russian regions of Asia and Siberia, commissioned by Czar Nicholas I. Charles Darwin referred to him often in the Voyage of the Beagle (1839), an account of the voyage to South America and the Galápagos Islands on which Darwin first developed his theory of evolution. Edgar Allan Poe dedicated Eureka; A Prose Poem (1848) to Humboldt, since the strange work’s cosmology, including a version of the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe, was inspired partly by Humboldt’s remarkable travels and discoveries.