Dr. Balázs Dénes szerk.: Földrajzi Múzeumi Tanulmányok 7. (Magyar Földrajzi Múzeum; Érd, 1989)

ÉRTEKEZÉSEK - Könnyű László: A világjáró Xántus János Amerikában

Táncoló witchitaw indiánok (Xántus J. rajza, 1856) THE GLOBETROTTER JÁNOS XÁNTUS IN AMERICA János Xántus went in exile after the fall of the 1848—49 war of independence. In 1851 he arrived to New York and began to work on designing the course of the Pacific Railway in the states of Missouri and Kansas. Subsequently he settled near New Buda, Iowa. In 1855 he joined the army under the name of Lajos Vésey. Based in Fort Riley, Kansas, he used his spare time for preparing plants and animals for the Smithsonian Institution of Washington. In 1859 he went to California, where he kept on with collecting in the natural history. In his work 'Travel to Southern California' he published the call of the Smithsonian Institution to establish exchange relations and thus he laid the foundations of Hungarian

—American cooperation in natural history. Commissioned by Baird, general secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, he visited Baja California, where he entered the job of sea current observer for the Coastal Survey. At the southernmost tip of the peninsula, at Cape S. Lucas, he built an instrument to record sea currents. Under the hostile conditions of this uninhabited country, he carried on his scientific work, collected animals and plants. In 1861 he returned to Hungary, where he delivered his inaugural address at the Academy of Sciences under the title 'Data to the physical geography of the sea'. After his return to the United States, due to the intervention of Baird, he was appointed by the State Department consul to Manzanillo, Mexico. In 1865 he returned to his native country for good. In Budapest he founded the Zoo and became its first director. Between 1868—1870 he took part at a collecting expedition in Eastern Asia, Java, Borneo, the Philippines, Japan and Ceylon, where he carried out natural history and etnographic collection work. In 1872 he became curator at the Etnography Department of the National Museum. János Xantus was a founding member and vicepresident of the Hungarian Geographical Society. He made substantial contributions to the development of Hungarian

—American relations in the natural sciences. Translated by D. Lóczy