A Motivating Example

Curiosity, of course, has its positive side. Consider the case of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century German naturalist and explorer after whom the Humboldt Current, off the west coast of South America, was named.

At one point in his life, Humboldt said: “From my earliest youth I had felt an ardent desire to travel into distant regions, which Europeans had seldom visited.” This desire arose, he said, when he felt “an irresistible attraction in the impetuous agitations of the mind.” At the age of 29, he traveled to Central and South America on an expedition that lasted five years. With the information that he collected, he compiled a 30-volume chronicle of his travels.

Everything attracted Humboldt’s attention​—the temperature of the ocean, the fish that lived in it, the plants he found in his path. He climbed mountains, explored rivers, and sailed the oceans. Humboldt’s research laid the foundation in several fields of modern science. It all began with his intense curiosity, and his insatiable desire for knowledge accompanied him throughout his life. In the words of American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Humboldt was one of those wonders . . . who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and the range of the faculties.”

[Picture on page 19]

Alexander von Humboldt