A thematic "Atlas of Ethnology", published as individual volume in a series of 7 volumes of Berghaus Physikalischer Atlas. This edition was a third edition of the Physikalischer Atlas, originally published by Heinrich Berghaus (uncle of Hermann Berghaus, auhthor of this edition) in mid 19th century.
The atlas contains loads of interesting information in 15 very detailed and scientifically accurate double page copper engraved maps. Despite chromolitography (printing in colour from stone plates) has already been used successfully in other publishing houses for more than a decade, Berghaus insisted on printing the maps from copper plates and hand colouring them later (requiring enormous amount of effort to produce each copy) to achieve superiority in detail such scientific atlas required.
The list of maps (the number in brackets shows total number of maps including smaller inset maps):
- Skin and hair (2 maps)
- Population density of the Earth (3 maps)
- Religions and religious customs (2 maps)
- Spread of diseases (3 maps)
- Clothing, food, housing and employment (4 maps)
- Nations in the years 1500 and 1880 (2 maps)
- Europe around 1880 (3 maps)
- Asia until 1880 (3 maps)
- South-East Asia
- Oceania (2 maps)
- Africa (7 maps)
- Native Americans (2 maps)
- America in 1880 (2 maps)
- Languages of the Earth up to the year 1890 (9 maps)
- Europe around 100-150 AD (5 maps)