Who They Are

See Who Are They? and its combox.

After I wrote that post, I wondered if Anderson had created some characters who were obscure precisely because they were not in the historical record. There will be some (many) losers/failures whose names are not known precisely because they did lose/fail. There are also many people who would have been in the historical record if history had gone differently. There was a superhero team comic where the time traveling heroes had to prevent the childhood assassinations of US Presidents. There was one name on the list that we did not recognize. That was the one case in which they failed. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol has records of time gone awry.

However, blog reader Jim Baerg has identified the mysterious Frenchman and Muslim:

Lamarck

Ibn Kaldun

A cursory glance down these Wikipedia articles shows how these two men precursed later, better known, thinkers. Poul Anderson packs a lot of history into a short text that reads like random fragments from several tavern conversations.