vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 



various plans of foreign travel which he had contemplated, 

 and detained him an unwilling prisoner in Europe. In the 

 year 1 799 he went to Spain, with the hope of entering Africa 

 from Cadiz, but the unexpected patronage which he received 

 at the Court of Madrid, led to a great alteration in his plans, 

 and decided him to proceed directly to the Spanish Posses- 

 sions in America, " and there gratify the longings for foreign 

 adventure, and the scenery of the tropics, which had haunted 

 him from boyhood, but had all along been turned in the dia- 

 metrically opposite direction of Asia." After encountering 

 various risks of capture, he succeeded in reaching America, 

 and from 1799 to 1804 prosecuted there extensive researches 

 in the physical geography of the New World, which have 

 indelibly stamped his name in the undying records of science. 



Excepting an excursion to Naples with Gay Lussac and 

 Von Buch in 1805 (the year after his return from America), 

 the succeeding twenty years of his life were spent in Paris, 

 and were almost exclusively employed in editing the results 

 of his American journey. In order to bring these results 

 before the world, in a manner worthy of their importance, 

 he commenced a series of gigantic publications in almost 

 every branch of science, on which he had instituted obser- 

 vations. In 1817, after twelve years of inces&ant toil, four- 

 fifths were completed, and an ordinary copy of the part 

 then in print, cost considerably more than one hundred pounds 

 sterling. Since that time the publication has gone on more 

 slowly, and even now, after the lapse of nearly half a century, 

 it remains, and probably ever will remain, incomplete. 



In the year 1828, when the greatest portion of his literary 

 labour had been accomplished, he undertook a scientific 

 journey to Siberia, under the special protection of the Russian 

 Government. In this journey a journey for which he had 

 prepared himself by a course of study unparallelled in the 

 history of travel he was accompanied by two companions 

 hardly less distinguished than himself, Ehrenberg and Gustav 



