1. For a description of these two visits see Forster, Georg, Werke in Vier Bänden, ed. Steiner, Gerhard, 4 vols. (Leipzig, n.d.), 4: 90–92, 372–74.Google Scholar

2. Quoted in Kersten, Kurt, Der Weltumsegler: Johann Georg Adam Forster, 1754–94 (Bern, 1957), p. 371.Google Scholar

3. Johann Stephan Pütter, the eighteenth-century historian of the university at Göttingen, reported that the quality and range of one's travel was one of the standards for employment there. Pütter, Johann Stephan, Versuch einer Akademischen Gelehrten-Geschichte der Univ. zu Göttingen, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1765–1788), 1: 5.Google Scholar

4. It is possible to see Locke's epistemology, it seems to me, as a kind of institutionalization of the improvisational way of knowing he encountered in the many travel books he read. For his reading see Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1965), pp. 4–29.Google Scholar

5. Cf. Petrarch, : “Who among us is not a traveler? All of us must cover a long and difficult road in a short time in bad weather, almost as it were on a rainy winter day. Occupation with dialectic may cover a part of this road; it ought never to be the goal.” The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Cassier, Ernst et al. (Chicago, 1948), pp. 137–38.Google Scholar And Bacon, : “It is fit that I set forth those conjectures of mine which make hope reasonable, just as Columbus did, before that wonderful voyage of his across the Atlantic, when he gave the reasons for his conviction that new lands and continents might be discovered beside those which were known before; which reasons, though rejected at first, were afterward made good by experience, and were the causes and beginnings of great events.” The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Anderson, Fulton H. (Indianapolis, 1960), p. 91.Google Scholar

6. Gmelin's, review appeared in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 34 (1778): 588–609Google Scholar, Meiners's in the Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von Gelehrten Sachen, Mar. 7, 1778, pp. 148–59, and Mar. 21, 1778, pp. 177–88.

7. A useful study of the aims of the founders of the university is McClelland, Charles, “The Aristocracy and University Reform in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, ed. Stone, Lawrence (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 146–73.Google Scholar For what follows, I also rely on the early chapters of von Selle, Götz, Die Georg-August Universität zu Göttingen, 1737–1937 (Göttingen, 1937)Google Scholar, and Ebel, Wilhelm, Memorabilia Göttingensia (Göttingen, 1969), pp. 83–85.Google Scholar

8. The best source on the Göttingen faculty is Ebel, Wilhelm, Catalogus Professorum Gottingensium, 1734–1962 (Göttingen, 1962).Google Scholar

9. Pütter, , Versuch, 1: 6–7.Google Scholar

10. Cf. for example Eichhorn's comment that professors at Göttingen had “excited a spirit for statistical and political inquiries among their countrymen, by succeeding in their endeavours to establish the study of these subjects as a regular branch of university education. It was altogether in the spirit of Michaelis to keep pace with his contemporaries in this new and favorite pursuit; and he very soon began to apply it … by making it subservient to the illustration of his own more immediate department of science, while yet no other investigator of ancient learning had ever yet conceived any such idea.” Quoted in the translator's preface to Michaelis, Johann David, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses, trans. Smith, Alexander (London, 1814), p. xvii.Google Scholar

11. Lewin, Karl, Die Entwicklung der Sozialwissenschaften in Göttingen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, 1734–1812 (Ph.D. diss., Göttingen, 1971), pp. 408–9, found that of 20 social scientists he studied, 8 had studied at Göttingen, another 5 at Halle. The percentage of Göttingen products of course increased as the university grew older.Google Scholar

12. August Schlözer, Ludwig, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie (Göttingen and Gotha, 1772), unpaged preface.Google Scholar

13. Köhler, Johann David, Anweisung für Reisende Gelehrte, Bibliotecken, Münz-Cabinette, Antiquitäten-Zimmer, Bilder-Säle, Naturalien und Kunst-Kammern, u.d.m. mit Nutzen zu Besehen (Frankfurt a.M., 1762)Google Scholar, unpaged preface; Schlözer, August Ludwig, Vorlesungen uber Land- und Seereisen, nach dem Kollegheft des Stud. jur. E. F. Haupt, ed. Ebel, Wilhelm (Göttingen, 1964), pp. 11–13.Google Scholar

14. Michaelis, Johann David, Fragen an eine Gesellschaft Gelehrter Männer, die auf Befehl Ihro Maj. des Königs von Dännemark nach Arabien Reisen (Frankfurt a.M., 1762), unpaged introduction.Google Scholar Michaelis also enjoined each member of the party to keep a separate journal as a corrective to the others' visions.

15. Schlözer, Vorstellung, pp. 13–22. Reill, Peter, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975)Google Scholar, misses, I think, the extent to which Schlözer's work and the work of the whole Göttingen school consisted in the attempt to tabulate everything, and therefore the extent to which they meant something quite different than later historians meant when they talked of such things as historical development. For Schlözer each society was a kind of moving table of factors, clashing occasionally with other tables.

16. Schlözer, Vorstellung, p. 15.

17. The most complete treatment of Schlözer's attitude toward the state is Warlich, Bernd, August Ludwig von Schlözer, 1735–1809, zwischen Reform und Revolution (Ph.D. diss., Erlangen/Nüremberg, 1972), pp. 177–271.Google Scholar

18. Meiners, Christoph, Geschichte des Weiblichen Geschlechts, 4 vols. (Hanover, 1788–1800), 1: viGoogle Scholar; Michaelis, Commentaries, pp. 4–5.

19. Wieland, Christoph Martin, Gesammelte Schriften, sec. 1, vol. 22 (Berlin, 1954), pp. 20–50, 214–15.Google Scholar The review appeared originally in the Teutsche Merkur for 1778.

20. Bruford, W. H., Culture and Society in Classical Weimar (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 9–22, 48–52, 74–96.Google Scholar

21. On the problem of the career of letters in eighteenth-century Germany, Bruford, , Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background to the Literary Revival (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 271–327Google Scholar, is still very sound, although the subject has now become modish in Germany. Statistics are now conveniently gathered together in Kiesel, Helmuth and Munch, Paul, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1977).Google Scholar

22. There is no space here to go into this further, but I think it is worth noting how much energy was spent in Göttingen on social policy regarding marriage: Pütter wrote an extensive monograph on misalliance, Meiners his history of the female sex, and Michaelis's treatment of Mosaic law focused heavily on family law. All three tried to defend custom in these matters, whereas in Weimar there was a tendency to associate the break with law and custom with women: Wilhelm Meister, for example, ends happily in a series of misalliances.

23. A famous example of this is the passage from Venice, : “This evening I again climbed to the top of the Campanile. Last time I saw the lagoons in their glory at the hour of high tide; this time I wanted to see them in their humiliation at low tide, so as to have a complete mental picture.” Italian Journey, trans. Auden, W. H. and Mayer, Elizabeth (New York, 1962), p. 84.Google Scholar See Bruford, Culture, pp. 253–54.

24. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, trans. Carlyle, Thomas (Collier ed., New York, 1962), pp. 53–56Google Scholar. In having Wilhelm travel with a theatrical troop, Goethe chose the most unstable form of travel he could imagine that still had some professional aim. It contrasts sharply with Schlözer's concern for secure travel and, of course, was not included in his catalogue of the types of travel.

25. Cf. Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder (New York, 1976), pp. 192–96Google Scholar, on Herder and the sense of “belonging.” Herder derisively attacked Michaelis's study of Mosaic Law for dealing with the Israelites as if they were common-sense Europeans, rather than delving into the parts of their law that would reveal their communal feelings, such as blood revenge and the like. See Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen vom Jahr 1772, Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. Jahrhunderts, vols. 7–8 (Heilbronn, 1882–1883), pp. 220–23.Google Scholar

26. In this connection consider the Robinson Crusoe rage in Germany in the eighteenth century. Germans produced imitations of Crusoe by the hundreds and always tried to pin his origins down to some German province. See Gove, Phillip, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (New York, 1941), pp. 124–29.Google Scholar

27. Wilhelm Meister, p. 154.

28. On the German intelligentsia and social mobility see Gerth, Hans, Bürgerliche Intelligenz um 1800: Zur Sociologie des deutschen Frühliberalismus (Göttingen, 1976, reprint of 1935 edition), pp. 29–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar