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A portrait of James Cook in the gallery of Greenwich Hospital
Credit: GSinclair Archive/Getty
In February 1772, the musician and author Charles Burney held a special dinner at 42 Queen Square, his London residence. The guest of honour was Captain James Cook, who, since returning from his three-year expedition to the South Pacific the previous year, had become something of a celebrity.
Burney’s primary objective that evening was to advance his son’s naval career, but, like all of London, he was eager for every detail of Cook’s voyage. Before supper, he took Cook on a tour of his library, to which he had recently added the newly published travel diaries of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French adventurer who had made his own, less successful, Pacific voyage in 1766.
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The presiding scientific genius of the Romantic age, when science had not yet been dispersed into specialties that rarely connect with one another, Alexander von Humboldt wanted to know everything, and came closer than any of his contemporaries to doing so. Except for Aristotle, no scientist before or since this German polymath can boast an intellect as universal in reach as his and as influential for the salient work of his time. His neglect today is unfortunate but instructive.
Humboldt (1769–1859) undertook to disseminate the knowledge he acquired as rapidly and widely as possible, and initiated a network of correspondents among the world’s principal scientific specialists. Thus, Humboldt’s prodigious achievement ironically made it impossible for his scientific descendants to have a career so wondrously varied as his. Taking the entirety of nature and culture as his province, through the gathering and arrangement of all the particulars that one extraordinary mind could hold