Friday, April 8, 2016

G is for Georg Honsen

Georg Honsen was born in the Great River Ülm.  From the cold waters he emerged, crying as a lion.  Or so he always told his friends.  The strength did not last long, as Georg developed into a sickly young boy.  He was unable to attend school with the other children of the town.  His uncle tutored him in letters, numbers, and his fields of astronomy and biology, as well as the history and literature he was familiar with.

Adolescence brought some reprieve for Georg, allowing him to venture out for frequent nights sleeping under the stars.  He conducted experiments on dead animals he found and began diagramming their structures.  At the age of 23, Georg wrote a book titled Maps of the Dead and of the Stars.  In it, he claimed a correlation between the stars and those animals living on the Earth.

Georg received some acclaim for his later works in biology and astronomy, but never achieved what he felt was a definitive explanation for why he felt the two fields were so very connected.  He died at the age of 53 on a voyage to the southern glaciers.

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