Introduction

Eugenius arrived at his destination around ten o’clock on July 8, 1863.

After spending the night at Manoel’s farmhouse, his guide since his arrival in Rio de Janeiro, they left the mules to travel the last few leagues still separating them from Lagoa Santa on horseback. Eugenius had planned to stay there for two years, and would stay for an additional year.

“The morning was pleasant. Bluebell-shaped flowers and many others adorned the hills”; “the dew was like pearls in the grass”, he wrote in his diary1. At almost 800 m above sea level, on the vast plateau of what is now Minas Gerais, the temperature was mild at that time of the year2. “I let my gaze wander over the large square in the center of town”.

Although the square was vast, Eugenius was soon to discover that the “town” was no more than a “miserable village” with low-slung houses and streets made of earth, limestone and short grass, as his photographs show. In the early 19th century, Lagoa Santa had 500 inhabitants and 80 houses. Manoel pointed out the one he needed to go to. He entered and stood waiting while his guide went to inform the owner of the premises who was resting in his garden at the back. After his morning stroll, he usually enjoyed the shade of the biribá and palm trees3.

Figure I.1. Dr. Lund’s house and garden, on the right inthe image (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Eugenius was nervous. He was about to meet the Danish scientist whose secretary he was to become. Then entered “a thin man with gray hair”. Peter Wilhelm Lund had passed the age of 60, Eugenius was not yet 22.

“To my surprise, he greeted me in German4. He was normally supposed to use this language with Mr Brent, who replaced me temporarily. I think I replied in German, but then he realized he would have to speak in Danish”. We can assume that Eugenius’ surprise must have been tinged with a certain amount of annoyance, given his strong patriotic feelings against the conquering German Confederation.

For the time being, dramatic news awaited him.

“After a few minutes of conversation, he [Lund] remembered that mail had arrived for me”; “the first letter I opened, with a strange sense of anguish, brought me paralyzing news: my mother was dead”. We can imagine the grief of the young man, an only child and fatherless, discovering that his mother had died on May 5, 1863, less than three months after his departure.

He landed in Rio de Janeiro on April 27 and stayed for five weeks. Far from Europe and his University of Copenhagen, he was delighted to discover the tropical nature surrounding the city. Like all naturalists, he observed, collected, drew, described and – a rarity at the time, given the technical difficulties that discouraged many beginners – used the bulky and fragile camera he had packed in his luggage (Davanne 1867; Gunthert 1999, p. 205). Cautious and organized, he took a two-week photography course before his departure.

His uneasiness, and even his guilt, can be seen in the lines left in his diary:

It’s true that I had received a letter in Rio from my mother’s brother informing that she was ill, but, as he himself had said, there was no danger, as I had left her in very good health and as for many years she had never been ill, I didn’t attach much importance to the fact.

His uncle, who took him and his mother in after his father’s death when he was barely three, probably did not want to alarm him. In any case, if Eugenius had decided to return, he would have had to face another arduous journey by mule to Rio de Janeiro, wait for a ship to take him to Europe and sail for many weeks.

A strange coincidence: Lund also learned of his mother’s death while on a study trip in Italy with the Danish botanist Joakim Frederik Schouw. Arriving in Sicily, they hired a cart and two mules, passing through Messina, Catania, Syracuse and Agrigento. In Palermo, Lund received a bundle of letters, including one from his cousin telling him the sad news. He returned to Copenhagen for the last time in the summer of 1831. With no family ties, he hesitated between settling in Paris or Brazil. According to Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt with whom he had an ongoing correspondence, his mind was already made up (Luna Filho 2007, p. 71 ff).

What does the face of young Eugenius, photographed at the age of 21 shortly before his departure for Brazil, express?

The half-length portrait shows a serious, almost austere face, with a bare forehead and hair swept back. He is wearing glasses, a pencil beard and a budding moustache. Photographs from this period have a certain frozen quality, due to the technical necessity of requiring the subject to remain motionless. This portrait, taken in a photographer’s studio, has been retouched like almost all of them. The background is neutral, with only the upper part of the torso visible. He did not stare at the lens, his gaze seemingly lost in contemplation of a distant horizon.

The intention here was not to show the subject in a particular situation, unlike those naturalists captured in postures that give the illusion of movement while in their study, sometimes in nature observing a detail, magnifying glass in hand. Later, after a brilliant career, Professor Warming came to take his place in these “galleries of contemporaries”, “photographic portraits of famous figures from politics, science and the arts”, fashionable from the second half of the 19th century onwards (Rouillé and Marbot 1986, p. 33; Gunthert 1999, pp. 13–14)5. These representations were intended to signify the social success or scientific notoriety of the person being “portrayed”. The physiognomy of the Swiss Johann Caspar Lavater was popular. Portraits were thought to reveal the personality, feelings emotions and even the soul of the subject.

Figure I.2. Portrait of Warming at age 21 (Klein 2002, p. 19)

When did Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming conceive the project that would make him the author of the first treatise on ecology? What was it intended for?

Mr Launay, professor of history at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, warned his students: to shed light on an individual’s intellectual, ideological, political and spiritual journey, ask yourself where he was, what he was going through and what decisions he made when he was 20.

This is how the destiny of an individual would then be written.

No one better than Balzac knew how to play with the destiny of his characters. In La Comédie humaine, he takes up the biological notion of milieu, defined by Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive and extended to human societies, where individuals interact with one another. Balzac sought to grasp the laws governing the distribution of social species. He analyzed the decisions, behaviors and aspirations of his characters. Drawing on the animal nomenclature established by paleontologist Cuvier and zoologist Buffon, he aligned the physical and the moral (Cohen 2004; Matagne 2004; Collet 2019).

Eugenius was born on November 3, 1841, on the small Danish island of Mandø in the Wadden Sea, the only son of Lutheran minister Jens Warming and Anna Marie von Bülow. Following his father’s untimely death, his mother left the island to live with her young child on the east coast of the Jutland peninsula, near Vejle, where Eugenius attended school before completing his secondary education in Ribe, less than 20 km from his native island. Introduced to botany by a natural history teacher, he became familiar with the plants of the Jutland coastline.

He enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1859, the publication year of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. An opportunity to travel presented itself. Professor Reinhardt proposed that he leave for Brazil to become secretary to the zoologist and paleontologist Lund, whose assistant he had been. Eugenius interrupted his studies.

He left on February 17, 1863 and returned to Denmark in October 1866.

On his return, he completed his studies in Copenhagen, then moved to Munich and Bonn to continue his research. He defended his doctoral thesis in 1871, the same year he married – he had eight children – then became temporary assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen at the age of 32, and professor at the University of Stockholm from 1882 to 1885. He returned to his home university, where he taught until his retirement. He was also the director of the Botanical Garden, where his herbarium, drawings, photographs and diary are now kept. A pedagogue, he devoted himself zealously to teaching, publishing botanical textbooks that met with great success. A man of the field, he felt it necessary to take his students outside the walls of the university. To open them up to the concepts and methods of botany and plant ecology, the botanical garden was not enough.

His work was enriched by his travels, which brought him into contact with landscapes and flora from latitudes as diverse as Greenland, Venezuela, the Caribbean, the Faroe Islands, Scandinavia and Tunisia, not to mention short stays in the Alps and the south of France.

How did the opportunities, the ups and downs of a life...