Table of Contents

Introduction
Select Bibliography
Chronology
A Note on the Text

From Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–29)
From Essay on the Geography of Plants (1807)
From Views of Nature (1849)
From Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas (1810–13)
From Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (1826)
From Cosmos. Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (1845–61)

Index

About the Author

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (1769-1859) was a German polymath and explorer whose expeditions, ranging from the highest peaks in the Andes to the steppes of Siberia, laid the groundwork for the field of biogeography.

ANDREA WULF was born in India and moved to Germany as a child. She lives in London, where she trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of The Invention of Nature, Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, and The Brother Gardeners, which was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and awarded the American Horticultural Society Book Award. She has written for The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She appears regularly on radio and TV, and in 2014 copresented British Gardens in Time, a four-part series on BBC television.