author
Georg Karl Cornelius Gerland
1833–1919
A wide-ranging 19th-century scholar, he moved from language and ethnology into geography and the young science of geophysics. His work connected classroom learning, field-sized questions, and some of the early international efforts to study the Earth scientifically.
1 Audiobook
Über das Aussterben der Naturvölker
by Georg Karl Cornelius Gerland
About the author
Born in Kassel on January 29, 1833, and later based in Strasbourg, Georg Gerland was a German scholar whose interests reached across philology, anthropology, geography, and geophysics. He studied in Berlin and Marburg, and before entering university life he spent many years teaching at secondary schools in Kassel, Hanau, Magdeburg, and Halle.
In 1875 he became a professor of geography at the University of Strasbourg, a post he held until 1910. Sources consistently describe him as unusually versatile: alongside work in anthropology and geography, he also helped shape early geophysics and was associated with the journal Beiträge zur Geophysik, which became closely linked with his name.
Gerland died in Strasbourg on February 16, 1919. He is remembered less as a writer of one famous book than as a bridge figure between older humanistic scholarship and the more international, earth-science-focused research culture that was emerging in the late 19th century.