polymathy in the Victorian era

We've kind of skipped around the centuries in trying to come up with a definition of polymathy, and we certainly skipped over the nineteenth century. Professor Silvan Schweber wrote an article titled "Scientists As Intellectuals: The Early Victorians," in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, in which he touched on this idea. He wrote, "What is striking about the early Victorian intellectual elite is their cultivation of polymathy, their insistence on mastering all that was known and could be known. The minimal standard of an educated man was considered by Augustus De Morgan [a pretty multi-talented guy himself] to be represented by 'a man who knows something of everything and everything of something.'"