![Oscar Ferdinand Peschel00](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Oscar_Ferdinand_Peschel00.jpg)
Oscar Ferdinand Peschel (17 March 1826,
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label=Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth larg ...
– 13 August 1875,
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...
) was a German
geographer
A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...
and
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...
.
Biography
As the son of an officer and teacher at the local
military school
A military academy or service academy is an educational institution which prepares candidates for service in the officer corps. It normally provides education in a military environment, the exact definition depending on the country concerned. ...
, Peschel studied law from 1845 to 1848 in Leipzig and
Heidelberg
Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...
. In 1850 he joined the editorial staff of the ''Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung''. In 1854 he took over the editorship for the journal ''Das Ausland'',
[Peschel, Oscar Ferdinand]
@ NDB/ADB Deutsche Biographie of which he continued until the end of March 1871.
In 1871 he became a full professor of the newly established chair of geography at the
University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...
.
[ This is thus the fourth oldest chair of geography in Germany after ]Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
, Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...
and Bonn
The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...
.
Peschel 1858 corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) is an independent public institution, located in Munich. It appoints scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledg ...
. Shortly before his death he was also a regular member of the Royal Saxon Society of Sciences in Leipzig.
Racial classification
In 1871 he became a full professor of the newly established Chair of Geography at the University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...
, he was also a prominent corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) is an independent public institution, located in Munich. It appoints scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledg ...
. Peschel is most remembered for his book ''The Races of Man: and their geographical distribution'' (1876) which classifies man into seven races: Australoids, (Papuans
The indigenous peoples of West Papua in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, commonly called Papuans, are Melanesians. There is genetic evidence for two major historical lineages in New Guinea and neighboring islands: a first wave from the Malay Arch ...
), (Melanesians
Melanesians are the predominant and indigenous inhabitants of Melanesia, in a wide area from Indonesia's New Guinea to as far East as the islands of Vanuatu and Fiji. Most speak either one of the many languages of the Austronesian language fa ...
), Mongoloids, Dravidians
The Dravidian peoples, or Dravidians, are an ethnolinguistic and cultural group living in South Asia who predominantly speak any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 250 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian spe ...
, Bushmen
The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are members of various Khoe, Tuu, or Kxʼa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the first cultures of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, ...
( Capoids), Negroids and Mediterraneans (Caucasoids
The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid or Europid, Europoid) is an obsolete racial classification of human beings based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The ''Caucasian race'' was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, de ...
- the race itself is divided by Peschel into the Hamite, Semite, and Indo-European families).
Selected works
* ''Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen'', 1858 - History of the eras of discovery.
* ''Geschichte der erdkunde'', 1865 - History of geography.
* ''Neue Probleme der vergleichenden Erdkunde als versuch einer Morphologie de Erdoberfläche'', 1870 - New problems of comparative geography in regards to the morphology of the earth's surface.
* ''Völkerkunde'', 1874 - Ethnology
Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural anthropology, cultural, social anthropolo ...
.
* "The races of man : and their geographical distribution", 1876.
* ''Abhandlungen zur Erd- und Völkerkunde'', 1877 - On geography and ethnology.
Legacy
Peschel Island
Peschel IslandKoldewey, Carl. 2015. ''The German Arctic Expedition 1869/1870: Narrative of the Wreck of the Hansa in the Ice''. Reprint (London, 1874). Bremen: Maritime Press, p. 442. ( no, Pescheløya) is the third-largest of the Bastian Islands ...
in the Svalbard
Svalbard ( , ), also known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen, is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. North of mainland Europe, it is about midway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range ...
archipelago is named after Peschel.Stadnamn i norske polarområde: Pescheløya (Svalbard).
/ref>
References
* Parts of this article are based on text of an equivalent article at the German Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia (german: Deutschsprachige Wikipedia) is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
Founded on March 16, 2001, it is the second-oldest Wikipedia (after the English Wikipedia), ...
.
* Rainer W. Gardener, The development of scientific geography in Saxony under the influence of Oscar Peschel, Delitsch Otto and Ferdinand von Richthofen, typescript written. Diss. Leipzig 1993.
*Friedrich Ratzel: Peschel, Oscar . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB).
* Friedrich Ratzel: Peschel, Oscar . General German Biography (ADB). Band 25, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887, S. 416–430. Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887, pp. 416–430.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peschel, Oscar
1826 births
1875 deaths
Amateur anthropologists
German geographers
German anthropologists
German ethnologists
Leipzig University faculty