Leopold Von Buch – författare

In Travels Through Norway and Lapland, Leopold von Buch (1774-1853), a German geologist and palaeontologist, recounts his expedition to Scandinavia in 1806-1808. This book, originally published in Berlin in 1810, and in this English translation in 1813, describes these large, sparsely populated regions at the turn of the nineteenth century. The translator's preface provides an important geo-political backdrop - the possibility of war in Norway and the machinations of Sweden, Russia and Great Britain over the future of this territory. Von Buch's observations, however, are firmly engaged with the scientific. He writes that his motivation for the expedition was to find out how the harsh climate influenced the land, and he records detailed information about the weather and the region's mineralogy and geological structure. He also describes the local population, providing a wide-ranging account of life in the remote reaches of Northern Europe.

The German geologist Leopold von Buch (1774-1853) was a fellow-student of Alexander von Humboldt, with whom he later did fieldwork that led to important advances in the understanding of the Jurassic system and the origins of basalt. In 1815 Buch and the Norwegian botanist Christian Smith spent several months in the Canary Isles, and the resulting book, which appeared in 1825, is one of Buch's most important publications. It contains three papers Buch had previously published in journals, on flora (1816), the 1730 eruption on Lanzarote (1818) and temperature (1820), with additional chapters on population, land area and economics, the measurement of altitude, mineralogy, and detailed comparative data on volcanoes around the world. The substantial introduction includes a journal that records Buch's enthusiasm for the islands' scenery, natural history and people, and an obituary of Smith, who died in 1816 on a research trip to the Congo.