Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain: A Critical Edition; Alexander von Humboldt: The Complete Drawings from the American Travel Diaries

Abstract

nity to make copies of maps collected by the Spanish naval officer Felipe Bauzá y Cañas (1764–1834), chief cartographer on Alessandro Malaspina’s expedition to the Americas, Oceania and Australasia between 1789 and 1794. As a pioneer of infographics, Humboldt also designed altitude profiles, contour lines and geographicclimatic diagrams such as those showing vegetation zonation according to altitude and latitude in his famous Géographie des plantes équinoxiales (1807). For him, epistemic drawing was heuristic, a tool for gaining knowledge; he used maps as a ‘visualized series of measurement’. This publication, which contains a helpful timeline, is an excellent basis for all who want to study Humboldt as a mapmaker.