Word: naturalist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Church's desire to go south was sparked by his reading the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who had traveled in Central and South America at the turn of the century. Humboldt was not only a scientist but a great popularizer. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in an excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before...