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The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors from disciplines across the arts and humanities, t...
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Christina Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach have created in these two volumes a panoramic history of German theoretical physics. Bridging social, institutional, and intellectual history, they chronicle the work of the researchers who, from the first years of the nineteenth century, strove for an intellectual mastery of nature. Volume 1 opens with an account of physics in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century and of German physicists' reception of foreign mathematical and experimental work. Jungnickel and McCormmach follow G. S. Ohm, Wilhelm Weber, Franz Neumann, and others as these scientists work out the new possibilities for physics, introduce student laboratories and instruction in mathematical physics, organize societies and journals, and establish and advance major theories of classical physics. Before the end of the nineteenth century, German physics and its offspring, theoretical physics, had acquired nearly their present organizational forms. The foundations of the classical picture of the physical world had been securely laid, preparing the way for the developments that are the subject of volume 2.
Inspired by the life and times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859 , this biography follows Humboldt, who is considered the father of the Natural Sciences and in his day was as well known as Napoleon, and traces his childhood in what was then Prussia, his education at various Universities his training as a mining engineer and how he progressed into the sciences. Duringing the Age of Enlightenment, Humboldt's journey to South America between 1799 and 1804 with Aime Bonpland, changed the course of both their lives and during this period of exploration, they sent back to Paris and Berlin some 6000 samples of new species, minerals and animals. En route the scientists collected a mass of detailed information - cartographical, geological, astronomical, botanical, anthropological and linguistic - that took a life time to decipher.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.