Alexander von Humboldt - Cosmos (2/6)

COSMOS: A SKETCH OF A PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE UNIVERSE
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of romantic philosophy. Many consider him to be the last of the great polymaths. After his death in 1859, the scientific world began to divide into separate disciplines, each with its own knowledgeable but narrowly defined experts. Humboldt’s mind encompassed all that was then known of nature in one great whole. He could well be considered the father of modern ecology and earth studies. His great scientific and literary achievement was the multi volume Cosmos, twenty years in the writing, in which he attempted to describe the known physical world. Humboldt’s lyrical style of writing influenced the subsequent genre of nature writing as well as many of the towering figures of the Romantic movement. This Librivox recording is of the Introduction to Cosmos. The Introduction gives a good measure of breadth of Humboldt’s mind and is a pleasure to read or hear because of its literary felicity. This reading omits the copious footnotes in favor of maintaining the flow of thought of the body of the text. Also included are the translator’s preface which contains a short biography of Humboldt as well as the author’s own preface.

FRIEDRICH W. H. A. von HUMBOLDT
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769 – May 6, 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt's advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.

Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in several volumes over twenty one years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).

Humboldt resurrected the use of the word cosmos from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multivolume treatise, Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity. He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels.

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