Alexander
von Humboldt was a natural historian, geographer and explorer
who was the first European to travel widely in Central and South
America with the intention of describing the flora and fauna of this
hitherto unrecorded region. He was also the first geographer to notice
the obvious similarity between the eastern coastline of South America
and the western coastline of Africa, thus suggesting the theory of
plate tectonics for which he was widely ridiculed until the twentieth
century. Humboldt was a remarkable polymath, known for his careful
observations and discoveries relating to subjects as wide ranging as
chemistry, mineralogy, forestry, astronomy, oceanography and global
magnetism. He appropriately entitled his most well read and
widely-known work The Cosmos
(five volumes, 1845-62). His traveling companion in South America was
Aimé Bonpland, a botanist who described over 6,000 new plants on
their journey; they collected a total of 60,000. Humboldt returned home
by way of the United States, where he met Thomas
Jefferson, also well known by then as a natural scientist, and was
elected a member of the American
Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. His final voyage was a
journey to the Russian regions of Asia and Siberia, commissioned by
Czar Nicholas I. Charles
Darwin referred to him often in the Voyage of the Beagle (1839), an
account of the voyage to South America and the Galápagos
Islands on which Darwin first developed his theory of evolution.
Edgar Allan Poe dedicated Eureka; A
Prose Poem (1848) to Humboldt, since the strange work's
cosmology, including a version of the "Big Bang" theory of the origin
of the universe, was inspired partly by Humboldt's remarkable travels
and discoveries.
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