In 1861 the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker published a devastating review of an expedition undertaken by his German rivals, the Brothers Schlagintweit, to India and Central Asia. “There is ... a suspicion abroad,” Dalton informed readers of the Athenaeum, “that the brothers’ appointment was one of the most gigantic jobs that ever disgraced the annals of science.” A variety of impulses drove Dalton’s criticism: personal jealousy, national rivalry, professional integrity, and the one that most historians identify, the decline of Humboldtian methods under the onslaught of Darwinian theory. My talk will propose an additional interpretation of this controversy, namely that Alexander von Humboldt’s lavish maps of vegetation never enjoyed quite the influence among botanists that their beauty might suggest. Much like Vesalius’s De Fabrica three centuries earlier, Humboldt’s images of the geographical distribution of plants at high altitude remained more of a monument to scientific illustration than a tool of working scientists.
