Oscar Peschel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oscar Peschel. Cover picture in his work History of the Age of Discovery. Stuttgart, 2nd edition 1877

Oscar Ferdinand Peschel , also Oskar Peschel , (born March 17, 1826 in Dresden , † August 31, 1875 in Leipzig ) was a German geographer , ethnographer, publicist and editor. A (now obsolete) classification of human races goes back to him .

Life

As the son of an officer and teacher at the local cadet school , Oscar Ferdinand Peschel studied law at the universities of Leipzig and Heidelberg from 1845 to 1848 . In 1850 he joined the editorial team of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung , to which he belonged for six years. In 1854 he took over the editing of the magazine Das Auslands , which he continued until the end of March 1871.

During this time he worked as a journalist a . a. with the Age of Discovery , the history of geography and comparative landform studies .

In April 1871, the University of Leipzig appointed him full professor of the newly established chair for geography. This subject was previously assigned to philology and was represented by Reinhold Klotz (until his death) and Heinrich Wuttke ( historical auxiliary sciences ). The new chair for geography was therefore only the fourth in Germany after Berlin , Göttingen and Bonn .

Peschel's reputation from his time in Augsburg was sufficient for the Philosophical Faculty not to seriously consider other candidates. The astronomer and head of the Leipzig University Observatory, Karl Christian Bruhns , was the strongest advocate of Peschel's appointment. Only the historian Heinrich Wuttke made other suggestions , as can be seen from Peschel's personal file in the Leipzig University Archives. He recommended the cartographer Heinrich Kiepert as well as the alpine researchers Friedrich Simony and Hermann von Schlagintweit , without considering these respectable capacities. Peschel's appeal was unanimously accepted.

The Bavarian Academy of Sciences had elected him a corresponding member as early as 1858 . Shortly before his death, Peschel also became a full member of the Royal Saxon Society for Science in Leipzig . His successors at the Leipzig chair were Otto Delitsch in 1876 and Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1883 .

Significance in geography and ethnology

Peschel is one of the most important successors of Carl Ritter . His work on the history of discovery was also popular with historians at the time . Its significance for scientific geography is revealed in his work. Although Peschel was not the founder, he was a pioneer of geomorphology , the beginnings of which go back to Alexander von Humboldt . His work on ethnological geography and geomorphology was trend-setting at the time. In Leipzig, geomorphology in the subject of geography was largely established through him and Ferdinand von Richthofen .

Other areas of work of Peschel were ethnology (on which he wrote a textbook in 1874) and anthropology . In his publication The Races of Man and their Geographical Distribution in 1876 he established a classification of human races that is now considered obsolete, but was the state of the art at the time. He divided mankind into seven main races: Mongolids , Australids , Dravida , Bushmen , Negroids , Mediterranean and Caucasian races .

plant

During his time with the Allgemeine Zeitung in Augsburg, his most important historical and geographical works were published, namely the history of the Age of Discovery (Stuttgart 1858, 2nd edition 1877) and the history of geography up to A. v. Humboldt and K. Ritter (Munich 1865; 2nd ed., Ed. Von Ruge, 1877), who were later followed by the New Problems of Comparative Geography as an attempt at a morphology of the earth's surface (Leipzig 1870, 4th ed. 1883).

As a professor in Leipzig he published his ethnology (Leipzig 1874), of which a second edition appeared after a few months (6th edition, edited by Alfred Kirchhoff , 1885). Peschel also wrote the work New Problems in Comparative Geography, which was important for the development of modern geography, in 1869 and was co-editor of the first great Humboldt biography in 1872.

After his death, the treatises on geography and ethnology (ed. Von Löwenberg , Leipz. 1877–1879, 3 vol.), Physical Geography , edited by G. Leipoldt (2nd ed., Das. 1883–1885, 2 vol.) Appeared .) and European national studies , edited by Otto Krümmel (1st section of the 1st volume, the. 1880).

Honors

The island of Pescheløya, discovered in 1868 by the First German North Polar Expedition , one of the Bastian Islands in the Hinlopen Strait ( Spitzbergen ), is named after Oscar Ferdinand Peschel.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Oscar Peschel  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Die kleine Enzyklopädie , Encyclios-Verlag, Zurich, 1950, Volume 2, page 342
  2. ^ Sabine Höhler: World spaces . Campus-Verlag , 2005, p. 122 ( online in Google Book Search).
  3. ↑ UAL: PA 800 Oscar Ferdinand Peschel, p. 16. Wuttke's separate vote from October 1870.
  4. ↑ Pescheløya . In: The Place Names of Svalbard (first edition 1942). Norsk Polarinstitutt , Oslo 2001, ISBN 82-90307-82-9 (English, Norwegian).
personal data
SURNAME Peschel, Oscar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peschel, Oscar Ferdinand (full name); Peschel, Oskar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geographer, publicist and editor
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1826
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1875
Place of death Leipzig