The seventeenth century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher has been called “the last man who knew everything.” From his studies in geology and biology, to his investigations of the language and religious practices of the ancient Egyptians, to his many experiments with mechanical instruments, he was truly an example of those remarkable people we call polymaths. Not surprisingly, given the broad expanse of its areas of potential study, many other prominent figures in the histories of natural philosophy and natural history are similarly worthy of the designation: Hans Sloane, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and John Herschel, to name only a few.
