Taking Part in the Unification of Italy

Abstract

Their pleasant experience of Italy was suddenly a thing of the past. As soon as the family arrived in England, Mary Somerville was ill for a while and, what was worse, discovered that a book similar in content to her own had just been published under the title Kosmos, by Alexander von Humboldt (Fig. 7.1), a Prussian geographer, naturalist, and explorer. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt had been traveling extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time from a modern scientific point of view. Kosmos was published as a multi-volume treatise, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture [HA].