German cartographer of ability, born in Herford, Germany, on the 16th of November 1828; died at Gotha on the 3rd of December 1890. He was connected for more than forty years with the map-making and publishing house which bears his name in Gotha, Germany. For many years, and indeed to the date of his death, he was regarded as an authority in geographical matters. He was not a traveler, but a recluse, devoting a powerful genius and an indefatigable application to the researches of travelers and other geographers, ancient and modern. One of his earliest tasks was the collection of statistics with regard to the measurements of heights, and one of the monuments of his genius is his hypsometric and orographic map of central Europe, which he published in 1857, which marked an epoch in mapmaking. One of his works was his eight-sheet map of the world on Mercator’s projection, which, appearing in 1863, has been sold all over the world, eleven editions having been issued under his direction. At the time of his death he was engaged upon the new edition of the Berghaus Physical Atlas, first produced by his great-uncle, Heinrich Berghaus, in 1852.
