Georg Hartung was a pioneering German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

  geologist

Geology

Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

. He is best known for several books and articles about the islands of Macaronesia

Macaronesia

Macaronesia is a modern collective name for several groups of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean near Europe and North Africa belonging to three countries: Portugal, Spain, and Cape Verde...

, especially the Azores

Azores

The Archipelago of the Azores is composed of nine volcanic islands situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is located about west from Lisbon and about east from the east coast of North America. The islands, and their economic exclusion zone, form the Autonomous Region of the...

 and the Canary Islands

Canary Islands

The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...

.

The work of Hartung on the Azores contains illustrations of great scientific interest. Georg Hartung also met and corresponded with Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 and with Sir Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell

Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...

, the pioneer of modern geology, from whom he received scientific samples. He visited the Canary Islands in the winter of 1853 and the spring of 1854.

Selected works

• Hartung. Mitbeschreibung der fossilen reste, von Prof. H. G. Bronn ..., Wilhelm Engelmann
  Wilhelm Engelmann
  Wilhelm Engelmann was a German publisher and bookseller .Engelmann was the son of a bookseller in Lemgo, who later moved to Leipzig. He attended Leipzig's Thomasschule and planned an academic career, but was forced to early self-reliance by the early death of his father...
  
  , Leipzig, 1860.
• Fritsch, Karl Wilhelm Georg von Hartung, Georg Reiss, Johann Wilhelm. Tenerife geologisch-topographisch dargestellt, ein Beitrag zur Kenntniss vulkanischer Gebirge von K. v. Fritsch, G. Hartung und W. Reiss, J. Wurster, 16 pp., 1867.
• Hartung, Georg. Die geologischen Verhältnisse der Inseln Lanzarote und Fuertaventura, Zürich
  Zürich
  Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
  
  , 166 pp., 1857.
• Hartung, Georg. Betrachtungen über Erhebungskrater, ältere und neuere Eruptivmassen, nebst einer Schilderung der geologischen Verhältnisse der Insel Gran Canaria. Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig, 108 pp., 1862.
• Hartung, Georg. Originalzeichnungen und Probedrucke zu Illustrationen der geologischen Beschreibungen der Azoren und Kanarischen Inseln. 1850 [ca.]