The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. By Andrea Wulf.Knopf; 496 pages; $30. John Murray; £25.
IN A superb biography, Andrea Wulf makes an inspired case for Alexander von Humboldt to be considered the greatest scientist of the 19th century. Certainly he was the last great polymath in a scientific world which, by the time he died in Berlin in 1859, aged 89, was fast hardening into the narrow specialisations that typify science to this day. Yet in the English-speaking world, Humboldt is strangely little-known. That is partly because polymaths are out of fashion. But it is also because Humboldt suffers, given the legacy of two world wars, from having been German. In 1869 thousands marched in Ohio to celebrate his centenary. Fifty years later German books were burnt in a huge public bonfire in Cleveland, while in Cincinnati Humboldt Street was renamed after that mediocre president, William Howard Taft.