---
title: "Cosmos (Humboldt book)"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_(Humboldt_book)"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:31:29.205896+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Humboldt's Cosmos had a significant impact on scientific progress, as well as various scientists and authors throughout Europe and America. Humboldt's work gave a strong impetus to scientific exploration throughout the nineteenth century, inspiring many, including Charles Darwin, who brought some of Humboldt's earlier writings with him on his voyage as the naturalist aboard the Beagle in the 1830s. Darwin called Humboldt "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived."
Cosmos influenced several American writers and artists, including Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Edwin Church. Emerson read Humboldt's work throughout his life, and for him, Cosmos capped Humboldt's role as a scientific revolutionary. Edgar Allan Poe was also an admirer of Humboldt, even dedicating his last major work, Eureka: A Prose Poem, to Humboldt. Humboldt's attempt to unify the sciences was a major inspiration for Poe's work. Walt Whitman was said to have kept a copy of Cosmos on his desk for inspiration as he wrote Leaves of Grass, and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, like Eureka, was a response to Humboldt's ideas. Following the itinerary of Humboldt's expeditions to Colombia and Ecuador, Church found subject matter for some of his most monumental landscape paintings, including The Falls of the Tequendama near Bogota, New Granada.
Although Cosmos and Humboldt's work in general had such a lasting impact on scientific thought, interest in Humboldt's life, work, and ideas over the past two centuries has dwindled in comparison to what it once was. However, starting in the 1990s and continuing to date, an upswing in scholarly interest in Humboldt has occurred. A new edition of Cosmos released in Germany in 2004 received avid reviews, renewing Humboldt's prominence in German society. German media outlets hailed the largely forgotten Humboldt as a new avatar figure for German national renewal and a model cosmopolitan ambassador of German culture and civilization for the twenty-first century.
Humboldt is also credited with laying the foundations of physical geography, meteorology, and especially biogeography. His account in Cosmos of the propagation of seismic waves also became the basis of modern seismology. His most enduring contribution to scientific progress, however, is in his conception of the unity of science, nature, and mankind. Cosmos showed nature as a whole, not as unconnected parts.

== Editions ==
Kosmos (in German). Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Johann Georg Cotta. 1845.
Kosmos (in German). Vol. 2. Stuttgart: Johann Georg Cotta. 1847.
Kosmos (in German). Vol. 3 Stuttgart: Johann Georg Cotta. 1850.
Kosmos (in German). Vol. 4. Stuttgart: Johann Georg Cotta. 1858.
Kosmos (in German). Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Johann Georg Cotta. 1862.
Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, editiert und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Ottmar Ette und Oliver Lubrich, Berlin: Die Andere Bibliothek 2014, ISBN 978-3-8477-0014-2.

== See also ==
Cosmos – 1980 book by Carl SaganPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Geographia Generalis – Geography textbook by Bernhardus Varenius

== References ==

== External links ==
COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1, Translated by E. C. Otté on Project Gutenberg
 Cosmos A Sketch of a Physical Description of The Universe public domain audiobook at LibriVox (Introduction only)