Johann Gottfried Ebel
Encyclopedia
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, was born at Zullichau (Prussia).
He became a medical man, visited Switzerland for the first time in 1790, and became so enamoured of it that he spent three years exploring the country and collecting all kinds of information relating to it. The result was the publication (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...
, 1793) of his Anleitung, auf die nützlichste und genussvollste Art in der Schweitz zu reisen (2 vols), in which he gave a complete account of the country, the General Information sections being followed by an alphabetically arranged list of places, with descriptions. It at once superseded all other works of the kind, and was the best Swiss guide-book till the appearance of Murray
John Murray (publisher)
John Murray is an English publisher, renowned for the authors it has published in its history, including Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron, Charles Lyell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and Charles Darwin...
(1838).
It was particularly strong on the geological and historical sides. The second (1804–1805) and third (1809–1810) editions filled four volumes, but the following (the 8th appeared in 1843) were in a single volume. The work was translated into French in 1795 (many later editions) and into English (by 1818).
Ebel also published a work (2 vols, Leipzig, 1798 1802) entitled Schilderungen der Gebirgsvolker der Schweiz, which deals mainly with the pastoral cantons of Glarus
Glarus
Glarus is the capital of the Canton of Glarus in Switzerland. Glarus municipality since 1 January 2011 incorporates the former municipalities of Ennenda, Netstal and Riedern....
and Appenzell
Appenzell
Appenzell is a region and historical canton in the northeast of Switzerland, entirely surrounded by the Canton of St. Gallen....
. In 1801 he was naturalized a Swiss citizen, and settled down in Zürich. In 1808 he issued his Chief geological work, Uber den Bau der Erde im Alpengebirge (Zürich, 2 vols). He took an active share in promoting all that could make his adopted country better known, e.g. Heinrich Keller's map (1813), the building of a hotel on the Rigi (1816), and the preparation of a panorama from that point (1823). From 1810 onwards he lived at Zürich, with the family of his friend, Conrad Escher von der Linth (1767–1823), the celebrated engineer.
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