to his foster children. The dialogue form, which is characterised by interruptions from the children but also comments by the narrating Father, is sometimes described as "Socratic," aiming at extracting the children's knowledge through skilfully asked questions. Genre Discovery is an example of early specific children's and youth literature which developed with the German educational movement of philanthropinism. The focus of philanthropinist children's writers lay in creating age-appropriate books which would serve their pedagogical purposes of teaching moral and factual knowledge. The philanthropinist background of the trilogy is apparent in its transmission of morals and of facts, especially related to the natural sciences. The first volume, for instance, contains an explanation of the system of longitude and latitude, and each volume is accompanied by a map of the dealt-with area of Central or South America. The narrative occasionally refers to these maps. Publication history and editions The trilogy is part of a larger work of Campe. It follows his earlier books Kleine Kinderbibliothek (1779–84) and Robinson der Jüngere (1779/80), translated into English as Robinson the Younger, the New Robinson or Robinson Junior, which is Campe's free adaptation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). At the same time Discovery presents a preparation for the subsequently published first collection of travelogues, Erste Sammlung interessanter und durchgängig zweckmäßig abgefasster Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend (1785–93, 12 volumes). The first German edition was published in 1781 (Kolumbus) and 1782 (Kortes, Pizarro) in Hamburg; in 1790 it saw the third edition and in 1834 the fifteenth authorised edition. The first French translation was published as early as 1782, followed by translations into English, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew and Yiddish. At the same time there were several unauthorised reprints available in German; Campe complained about these in a letter to Emperor Joseph II in 1784. Reception Contemporaries of Discovery usually received the work very positively. Louis, Prince of Prussia, expressed his admiration for the first volume of Discovery in a letter to Campe. He excuses his late reply to a previous letter by saying that he first had to reread the book several times and that he wished he possessed all those virtues of Columbus. An anonymous reviewer in the German Enlightenment journal Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek praises Campe's choice of topic and its utility but wishes for a more structured approach instead of the narratives. Of the general criticism that the German new humanists and others presented