 His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years.Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular).Humboldt resurrected the use of the word "cosmos" from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multivolume treatise, "Kosmos", in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture.