The translator of Ritter’s “Geographical Studies,” which has received in its English dress the hearty greeting of our most cultured scholars, takes a renewed pleasure in giving to the students of our higher Seminaries a second volume from the pen of the great Geographer. The former work, addressed, as its contents mainly were, to the members of the Royal Academy of Berlin, was too recondite in thought and too abstruse and elaborate in statement ever to become, whether in German or in English, a popular work; but the present volume—the bright, compact crystal of Ritter’s life—will pass into a general circulation, and will be recognized as not merely a simple and perfectly intelligible treatise, but as a masterly application of the comparative method of Geography, and as philosophical as it is practical and interesting.

Besides the voluminous Erdkunda, which deals almost exclusively with Asia, and treats it with an exhaustive fullness, Ritter has left the world the volume already referred to, and three courses of Academical Lectures. One of these courses is now before the reader; one of the remaining two relates to the geography of Europe, and the other to the history of Geographical Science and of Discovery. Of these three courses, a distinguished American scholar[1] has said: “Free from excessive details, systematic, clear, bold, and fresh, they are better fitted to bring up to the mind Ritter, the university instructor, than all his other writings.” This praise is by no means excessive; and the student who shall, with the assistance of a good physical atlas, go through this work, will find himself master of a far larger number of special facts than the size of the volume would indicate; and also of a science of Geography, which subsidizes all detail, and makes it auxiliary to the comprehension of relations no less beautiful and singular than are revealed in the study of the other departments of Nature.

The peculiar difficulties attending the translation of the Geographical Studies have not been met in this volume; in the University lecture-room, Ritter’s style, which, before the Royal Academy, was extremely involved, poetical and inexhaustive, became simple, straightforward, and luminous. In style, Ritter carried neglect to the point of slovenliness; and the finish which Humboldt cultivated so assiduously, he rejected as unworthy of a true scholar. The highly figurative words with which he used so liberally to decorate his writings, I have generally had to render with a rather too bare fidelity to a prose style; for grateful and captivating as they were to his German hearers, they would look over-fanciful to an English reader, and obscure rather than illustrate the thought. It has been my earnest purpose to make this work fill a great void in our educational literature; and its convenient size gives it an incomparable advantage over the voluminous works of Sir John Herschel and Mrs. Somerville; while in rigid philosophical precision, in method, in natural growth—not to use that inevitable German word development, (Entwickelung)—even those eminent geographers would, doubtless, award it the palm.

The demands of the public may yet render needful the translation of other of Ritter’s works; meanwhile, the editor of this work purposes to prepare a biography of that great man, whose memory all his pupils revere, and whose life was not less beautiful to his friends than it was fruitful and valuable to the whole scientific world.

W. L. G.

July 5, 1864.