The Invention of Nature is a masterful biography of the nearly forgotten explorer, scientist, and polymath Alexander von Humboldt. A Prussian nobleman, Humbolt came of age in the fervent height of the Enlightenment. After his domineering mother died, he abandoned a career as a mine inspector to live in revolutionary Paris, and then set out on an immense voyage across South America around 1800. With one companion, a few locally hired guided, and a collection of scientific instruments he navigated great rivers, climbed volcanos, collected specimens, and took copious notes.

Humboldt's genius was in a synoptic view of nature. He was the first to write fervently of the world as a connected web, to see the rich diversity of life in non-obvious places, to imagine that all things were connected, and then to daringly prove that they were with measurements showing climate zones and the interconnectedness of volcanos below the Earth. His ebullient writing made him a world-wide celebrity. He met and befriended President Jefferson and charmed scientists and salons in London, Paris, and Berlin.

Humboldt's later life met with some reversals. In the 1810s, he sought to make a second expedition to the Himalayas to gather comparative data. But along with the grandeur of South America, he had also written of the cruelty and waste of the Spanish colonial project, and the British East India Company was not about to let such a keen critic into their territory. Scientific and court obligations kept him tied to Berlin, a city which he despised. He made finally made a Asian expedition in his 60s at the behest of Russian crown, but one wonders what we missed. Financial troubles were a constant problem, even with a pension from the Prussian crown, as Humboldt spent his family fortune on expensive print runs of his books, new scientific instruments, and loans to junior scientists without regard for his own needs.

Humboldt's magnus opus was the multivolumn Kosmos, a grand scientific overviewed based on his journeys and immense scientific correspondence. Humboldt died at 89, a beloved hero worldwide. Wulf dips a little into the biographical details; Humboldt was a voluminous talker who lectured continuously, rather than having conversations. He had an acid tongue, which he turned on royal figures and lesser scientists. But he was also generous to a fault. Even after spending his considerable inheritance on exploration and publishing, he would give money and instruments to scientists just starting out. Humboldt's sexuality is also unconventional. He never married and avoided female companionship, instead forming very close bonds with a series of male friends. Wulf doesn't believe he was gay, and period mores allowed for more emotion between male friends than is typical today, but I can't see Humboldt as straight.

What elevates this book is Wulf's close examination of Humboldt's influence. He had a close friendship with Goethe. Darwin, Thoreau, and Muir all regarded Humboldt as an inspiration, and each closely annotated their copies of Humboldt's books as they developed their grand ideas. Humboldt's ideas are foundational to ecology.

So why isn't he better known today? Wulf blames anti-German prejudice in US and UK in the wake of 20th century wars, which made it bad taste to overtly draw on a German's ideas. Humboldt also faced political problems in his own life. He was simply too liberal for the reactionary politics that followed the dream of the French Revolution. A true European, he regarded Paris as his home, but was too Prussian for the French and too French for the Prussians. And finally, as a field scientist he never developed an eponymous law or experiment. The chemists and physicists who wrote the history of science were suspicious of a man who discovered things simply by being outdoors, and Humboldt's evocative and sensual prose, his perspective that one had to feel a part of nature, was alien to a field that was no longer natural philosophy, but now dozens of scientific disciplines.

The Invention of Nature is a gem.