Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature: How One of the Last True Polymaths Pioneered the Cosmos of Connections

Faraday’s experiments, simple and elegant, were carefully recorded in lab books that he bound himself, remembering the profession he had so happily left. In modern language, we would say he was a great chemist and a great physicist; Faraday described himself as a natural philosopher. With an uncanny gift for recognizing the salient points of an exp

THROUGHOUT HIS extraordinary career Louis Agassiz was a man of large plans and boundless energy, a spirit emboldened by noble…

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But the journals and the collections were only part of what had been accomplished, only a beginning. Humboldt would spend the next thirty-odd years and virtually all his personal fortune publishing thirty monumental volumes under the general title Voyages aux Régions Equinoctiales du Nouveau Continent,