In June 1799, twenty-nine year old Alexander von Humboldt set out on his voyage of discovery to South America. He explored for five years and spent the next twenty-one years writing his multivolume masterpiece, Kosmos. It lays out not only astonishingly detailed knowledge of South American botany and geology, but new concepts of how to observe and record natural phenomena. He studied temperature, magnetism, volcanoes, and much more. Many abridged versions of his work can be found in English. But his diary alone ran to more than 4,000 pages. The sheer abundance of his writing stands in the way of his becoming a writer with whom most readers gain a sense of ease or real familiarity. Apart from devoting yourself to decades of study, you can know von Humboldt only by extract and synopsis.
The German university, devoted to
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