As he wrote, “it was the discovery of America that planted the seed of the Cosmos.”[3] Due to all of his experience in the field, Humboldt was preeminently qualified for the task to represent the universe in a single work.

As the son of an aristocratic family in Prussia, he received the best education available at the time in Europe, studying under famous thinkers at the universities of Frankfurt and Göttingen.

[3] Beginning in Venezuela, he explored the Orinoco and upper Amazon valleys, climbed the volcanic mountain Chimborazo in Ecuador — then believed to be the world's highest mountain — investigated changing vegetation from the tropical jungles to the top of the Andes, collected thousands of plant specimens, and accumulated a vast collection of animals, insects, and geological fragments.

[4] His studies related to many scientific fields, including botany, zoology, geology, and geography, as well as narratives of popular travel and discussions of political, economic, and social conditions.

[1] Twenty-five years after his exploration of the Americas, at the age of sixty, Humboldt undertook an extended tour, subsidized by the Tsar of Russia, into the interior of Asia.

Upon his return, Humboldt left the publication of the scientific results to Ehrenberg and Rose, while his own work — a three-volume descriptive geography entitled Asie Centrale — did not appear until many years later.

[4] It was during his South American and Asian explorations that Humboldt made the observations crucial to forming his physical description of the universe in Cosmos.

[1] In 1827, having spent himself into poverty publishing his scientific works, his king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, reminded Humboldt of his debt and recalled him to Berlin.

[3] Beginning in 1828, Humboldt finally gave expression to his concept in his Berlin lectures, and from then on he labored to produce his physical description of the universe in book form.

[4]Humboldt viewed the world as what the ancient Greeks called a kosmos – “a beautifully ordered and harmonious system” – and coined the modern word “cosmos” to use as the title of his final work.

[3] He reintroduced Cosmos as “the assemblage of all things in heaven and earth, the universality of created things constituting the perceptible world.”[7] His basic purpose is outlined in the introduction to the first volume: "The most important aim of all physical science is this: to recognize unity in diversity, to comprehend all the single aspects as revealed by the discoveries of the last epochs, to judge single phenomena separately without surrendering their bulk, and to grasp Nature's essence under the cover of outer appearances.

Book parcels destined for London and St. Petersburg were torn out of our hands by agents who wanted their orders filled for the bookstores in Vienna and Hamburg.

[4] However, some felt he had not done justice to the contribution of modern British scientists and many were quick to point out that Humboldt, who had written so exhaustively about the creation of the universe, failed to ever mention God the Creator.

"[1] Cosmos influenced several American writers and artists, including Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Edwin Church.

[3] 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.

[3] 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.