Alexander Von Humboldt, The Last Person Who Knew It All adventure-journal.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from adventure-journal.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It may be a straw man argument to suggest a distinction between an amateur and professional naturalist (a word that may still mean something). “Natural history” was once like history itself in a spectrum from archaeologists, museum curators and trained historians to best-selling if sometimes questionable historical aficionados. A disjunction between amateur and professional naturalists […]
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