After a further year as an apothecary at Moers near Krefeld in the Lower Rhine region (1865–1866), he spent a short time at the high school in Karlsruhe and became a student of zoology at the universities of Heidelberg, Jena and Berlin, finishing in 1868.

Ratzel embarked on several expeditions, the lengthiest and most important being his 1874-1875 trip to North America, Cuba, and Mexico.

Ratzel had traveled to cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

His lectures were widely attended, notably by the influential American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple as well as Martha Krug-Genthe, the first woman to obtain a doctorate in geography.

His three volume work The History of Mankind[2] was published in English in 1896 and contained over 1100 excellent engravings and remarkable chromolithography.

Ratzel continued his work at Leipzig until his sudden death on August 9, 1904, in Ammerland, Lake Starnberg, Germany.

Ratzel's writings coincided with the growth of German industrialism after the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent search for markets that brought it into competition with Britain.

The main focus of this monumental work is on the effects of different physical features and locations on the style and life of the people.