German Geographers and German Geography 327 



KANT 



One of the most curious and admirable 

 types of the learned German, who, 

 though shut out from the world by 

 forces stronger than he, yet with the 

 eyes of the soul surveys and knows the 

 whole world better than many others 

 who have had all the advantages of 

 voyage and travel, is Immanuel Kant, 

 the philosopher of Konigsberg. The 

 work of this unique man in the develop- 

 ment of geograph}^, although through 

 his whole life he never saw more than 

 the environs of his native city, must 

 never be forgotten. In his youth he 

 was keenly interested in natural sci- 

 ences, and through the reading of voy- 

 ages and travels had acquired such a 

 perfect knowledge of geography that 

 during several semesters he gave lectures 

 on physical geography and on anthro- 

 polog}^ in addition to his philosophical 

 lectures, and great was his renown also 

 as an authority in nature problems. His 

 most wonderful work in this line, how- 

 ever, equal to the Critique of Pme 

 Reason^ is the Allgemrine Naturgesch- 

 ichte u?id Theorie des Himviels (General 

 natural history and theory of the heav- 

 ens), in which, forty years before La- 

 place, he exposed the formation of the 

 earth and the solar S5^stem out of a ro- 

 tating ball of gas, as it is now accepted. 

 B}^ a singular mischance the manuscript 

 was lost at the printer's, and w^e know 

 of it only through one of Kant's later 

 works, in which he gives a sketch of this 

 theor3^ Thus the great French mathe- 

 matician could formulate the theory 

 again and enjoy the glory of being the 

 discoverer of the Nebular Hypothesis, 

 which he well deserves, as he did not 

 know Kant' s book ; but later times have 

 rightly given this theory the name of 

 the " Kant-Laplace Hj^pothesis." 



HUMBOLDT 



Like Kant, many of the leading Ger- 

 man scientists of his time were attracted 



to geography. We may name here 

 the brothers Forster — Georg, author of 

 Ansichtoi vovi Niederrhein, and Johann 

 Reinhold, the companion of Cook on his 

 voyages — Leopold von Buch, the geolo- 

 gist, whose Voyage to Lappland is one 

 of the finest specimens of geographical 

 literature, and, above all, the great nat- 

 uralist, traveler, and geographer, Alex- 

 ander von Humboldt, the scientific dis- 

 coverer of the Equinoctial Regions of 

 the New Continent. In a course of lec- 

 tures which he gave in later years at 

 Berlin and worked out afterward into 

 one of his finest books, Kosnios, or Out- 

 lines of a Phj^sical Description of the 

 World, he delineated the subjects and 

 ends of geography in a most remarkable 

 way. To him the thought first pre- 

 sented itself that besides the different 

 departments of the special natural sci- 

 ences, there was need of a general one 

 which might bring the isolated facts of 

 the others together and trace out of them 

 the general features of the globe, or, as 

 he expresses it, " consider the results of 

 scientific research in its vast relations 

 to mankind," and "recognize in the 

 struggles of the elements that which is 

 produced by a certain order or law." 

 By this he ought not to be understood 

 as wanting in a philosopher's way to 

 derive the science of the earth by ab- 

 stract theories from some fundamental 

 principles ; not at all. His geography, 

 namel}', description of the earth, was 

 ' ' the thoughtful observation of the em- 

 pirical phenomena, ' ' and he repeats over 

 and over again that ' ' without a serious 

 inclination for the knowledge of details 

 ever}^ large and generalizing conception 

 of the world would be nothing but a 

 deceitful mirage, ' ' but that ' ' the details 

 of natural discover}^ possess an innate 

 force of mutual fertilization." Thus 

 ' ' the unit}^ of a physical description of 

 the world is no other but that v/hich is 

 found also in the study of history." 

 Both geography and history stand on 

 the same empirical foundation, but the 



