Not just a penguin

The Invention of Nature by A. Wulf. I just love it when somebody does something appropriate to their name. It seems to happen more often than you think. I used to think Humboldt was just a penguin. Of course I knew the penguin had probably been a person's name. I didn't think Humboldt was an adjective. But I knew nothing about him. It's odd that some people get all the credit for breakthrough discoveries when in fact an idea often builds amongst great men and women over many decades.
Andrea Wulf's excellent biography is subtitled The Lost Hero of Science and it's unfortunately down to a bit of anti-German feeling post two world wars that seem to have obscured this Prussian polymath from wider recognition. I think it's also difficult to classify someone like Humboldt when we are used to being able to say someone is a naturalist or a botanist or an astronomer or an explorer. Humboldt's strength is his description of people and places that brings his data and analysis to life and his ability to think about connected environmental systems where geology, geography and evolution are integrated. He sits fair and square in the centre of a continuous rope of thought that connects Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir (who persuaded the US President Roosevelt to effectively found the National Parks movement). Just a shame the British East India Company persistently prevented him from exploring India so his observations were restricted to South America and the Russian end of Asia. Not that it really dented his global vision and his legacy.