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Plants, people, and the cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt’s plant geography.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was among the most influential scholars of the 19th Century. His writings ranged across the sciences and humanities, and he made foundational contributions across a dizzying array of disciplines – a partial list includes oceanography, climatology, geomagnetism, volcanology, ecology, electrophysiology, economic geography, archeology, and linguistics. But a central fascination, spanning 70 years of his life, was with the diversity and distribution of plants. I will discuss Humboldt’s primary work on plant geography: Essay on the Geography of Plants (1807), de distribution geographica plantarum (1817), and essays in Views of Nature, placing his botanical thinking in broader context of his broader visions of a ‘general physics of the Earth’ and fusion of the sciences, arts, and humanities.