Cosmos, Vol. 5

acknowledged, which I have owed for over thirteen years now to a valued friend, and which my brother Wilhelm von Humboldt also enjoyed during the publication of his philosophical investigations into the Kawi language Kawi is an archaic literary language of Java, Bali, and Lombok, heavily influenced by Sanskrit. on Java, as well as on the diversity of human language structure. Not a single leaf of Cosmos has appeared that was not subjected, both in manuscript and in print, to the sharp, penetrating gaze of Professor Eduard Buschmann, Librarian at the Royal Library in Berlin and member of the Academy of Sciences. He has also been the intermediary for my manuscript, and for much longer still he has dedicated a devoted attachment to me. To his tireless activity and linguistic knowledge of southeastern Asia, we also owe the continuation of my brother's great work and its expansion through distant branches of the Malayan language family. His endeavor to reveal historical monuments of early migrations and the course of human development in the New Continent The Americas.—within the American language families that are still so poorly categorized, and in which he pursued deep-reaching work with my brother—has already brought a number of remarkable results to light.

With the earnest desire to concentrate the wealth of the most diverse material into the draft of a physical description of the world, I had to strive all the more seriously for some correctness in form. In the various languages in which I was prompted to write by a life of much movement, I have always presented what was to be printed to friends in whom I was entitled to place my trust, because the coloring of expression in its heightened