Georg Munster, Count zu (1776-1844), German palaeontologist, was born on the 17th of February 1776. He formed a famous collection of fossils, which was ultimately secured by the Bavarian state, and formed the nucleus of the palaeontological museum at Munich. Count Minster assisted Goldfuss in his great work Petrefacta Germaniae. He died at Bayreuth on the 23rd of December 1844.
Monster, Sebastian (1489-1552), German geographer, mathematician and Hebraist, was born at Ingelheim in the Palatinate. After studying at Heidelberg and. Tubingen, he entered the Franciscan order, but abandoned it for Lutheranism about 1529. Shortly afterwards he was appointed court preacher at Heidelberg, where he also lectured in Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis. From 1536 he taught at Basel, where he published his Cosmographia universalis in 1544, and where he died of the plague on the 23rd of May 1552. A disciple of Elias Levita, he was the first German to edit the Hebrew Bible (2 vols., fol., Basel, 1 5341 535); this edition was accompanied by a new Latin translation and a large number of annotations. He published more than one Hebrew grammar, and was the first to prepare a Grammatica chaldaica (Basel, 1527). His lexicographical labours included a Dictionarium chaldaicum (1527), and a Dictionarium trilingue, of Latin, Greek and Hebrew (1530). But his most important work was his Cosmographia, which also appeared in German as a Beschreibung alter Lander, the first detailed, scientific and popular description of the world in Munster's native language, as well as a supreme effort of geographical study and literature in the Reformation period. In this Munster was assisted by more than one hundred and twenty collaborators.
The most valued edition of the Cosmographia or Beschreibung is that of 1550, especially prized for its portraits and its city and costume pictures. Besides the works mentioned above we may notice Munster's Germaniae descriptio of 1530, his Novus orbis of 1532, his Mappa Europae of 1536, his Rhaetia of 1538, his editions of Solinus, Mela and Ptolemy in 1538-1540 and among nongeographical treatises his Horologiographia, 1531, on dialling (see Dial), his Organum uranicum of 1536 on the planetary motions, and his Rudimenta mathematica of 1551. His published maps numbered 142.
See V. Hantzsch, Sebastian Munster (1898), in vol. xviii. of the Publications of the Royal Society of Sciences of Saxony, HistoricalPhilological Section).
