Cosmos, Vol. 5

reminds us how Welcker Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868), a prominent German classical philologist and archaeologist. has connected Cadmus original: "Kádmos"; the legendary founder of Thebes, often associated with the introduction of the alphabet. with this."

The age I have reached during the completion of this physical description of the world, and the feeling of diminishing strength, might prompt me—given the great and unexpected indulgence with which the work has been received in wide circles until its delayed conclusion—to express a wish for the preservation or even the increase of this indulgence. However, since my early youth, I have been so permeated by the scientific ambition that has animated my entire intellectual activity that, in contradiction to that wish, I feel the need to see my work treated with greater rigor than before. The circulation of the five volumes of Cosmos original: "Kosmos" is all the greater as they appear translated into at least nine different languages. In the mass of facts, especially numerical data, which are accumulated in the texts and in two and a half thousand notes of such varying lengths, errors must often have crept in through my own fault and through the fault of my translators. I do not call "erroneous" that which contradicts later discoveries, but rather that which contradicts what was already no longer well-founded according to the state of knowledge at the time a volume of the work was printed. Inaccurately observed facts, however, or opinions circulated in the guise of facts, are—as I have noted previously—more stubborn and harder to banish than complex hypotheses about real natural processes.

I would fear having neglected a duty dear to me if, at the conclusion of an introduction to the final volume of Cosmos, I did not publicly [acknowledge] the assistance so important to me