Alexander von Humboldt, introduced at an early age by his tutor to a group of learned intellectuals including the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, attends the University of Gottingen, where he studies archaeology, physics, and philosophy from 1789.

Here, he meets Georg Forster, recently returned from his voyage around the world with Captain Cook, a meeting which serves to heighten Humboldt’s already keen interest in botany and exploration.

In the summer of 1790 he pays a short visit to England in the company of Forster.

Humboldt leaves Gottingen in 1790 to study geology under A. G. Werner at the school of mines in Freiburg.

The 1797 Riobamba earthquake, which occurs at 12:30 UTC on February 4, devastates the city of Riobamba and many other cities in the Interandean valley, causing up to forty thousand casualties.

It is estimated that seismic intensities in the epicentral area reach at least XI (Extreme) on the Mercalli intensity scale, and that the earthquake has a magnitude of 8.3, the most powerful historical event known in Ecuador.
The area of significant damage (Intensity ≥VII) extends from Quito in the north to more than sixty kilometers south of Riobamba, including the cities of Guaranda, Ambato, Latacunga and the towns of Saquisilí and Baños.

Riobamba and the town of Quero are both destroyed by landslides.

At the foot of the Tungurahua volcano, the Pastaza River will be dammed by landslides for up to eighty days.

The earthquake will be studied by Alexander von Humboldt, when he visits the area in 1801/2.

Humboldt's analysis of this earthquake will reliy on anecdotal accounts that he gathers during his visit.

Some of the observations such as "the bodies of many of the inhabitants were found to have been hurled to Cullca, a hill several hundred feet in height and on the opposite side of the river Lican", are not credible.

He will a figure of thirty to forty thousand for the number of casualties, while some more recent estimates give figures as low as six thousand.

Alexander von Humboldt has devoted his talents to the purpose of preparing himself as a scientific explorer.

With this emphasis, he has studied commerce and foreign languages at Hamburg, geology at Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg under A. G. Werner, anatomy at Jena under J. C. Loder and astronomy and the use of scientific instruments under F. X. von Zach and J. G. Köhler.

His researches into the vegetation of the mines of Freiberg had led to the publication, in 1793, of his Florae Fribergensis Specimen.

Long experimentation on muscular irritability, then recently discovered by Luigi Galvani, are contained in his Versuche über die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser (Berlin, 1797) (Experiments on the Frayed Muscle and Nerve Fibres), enriched in the French translation with notes by Blumenbach.

In 1794, Humboldt had gained admission to the famous Weimar coterie and had contributed (June 7, 1795) to Schiller's new periodical, Die Horen, a philosophical allegory entitled Die Lebenskraft, oder der rhodische Genius.

In 1792 and 1797 he was in Vienna; in 1795 he had made a geological and botanical tour through Switzerland and Italy.

He had obtained in the meantime official employment by appointment as assessor of mines at Berlin, February 29, 1792.

Although this service to the state is regarded by him as only an apprenticeship to the service of science, he has fulfilled its duties with such conspicuous ability that not only has he risen rapidly to the highest post in his department, but he has also been entrusted with several important diplomatic missions.

The death of his mother, on November 19, 1796, and a consequent large inheritance, sets him free to follow the bent of his genius, and severing his official connections, he waits for an opportunity to fulfill his long-cherished dream of travel.

In 1799, after obtaining permission from the Spanish government, Humboldt and the French botanist Aime Bonpland sail from Marseille to Spanish colonial lands in South America.

Humboldt and Bonpland conclude their five-year expedition in 1804, having journeyed through every type of region in present Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru, and collected an enormous amount of data on flora (about sixty thousand specimens), fauna, climate, astronomy, geology, and the Earth's geomagnetic field.

Off the coast of South America, Humboldt measured the temperature of ocean water and described the upwelling of cold water from below (once called the Humboldt Current but since named the Peru Current).

Humboldt has also conducted extensive ethnographic, historic, and linguistic research during the expedition.

Alexander von Humboldt makes a short visit to the United States after departing Mexico, staying in the White House as a guest of President Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, a scientist himself, is delighted to have Humboldt as a guest and the two hold numerous intense discussions on scientific matters.

After six weeks, Humboldt sets sail for Europe from the mouth of the Delaware.

The world's first geographical society, the Société de géographie, is established on December 15, 1821, in the Paris Hôtel de Ville.

Among its two hundred and seventeen founders are some of the greatest scientific names of the time, including Pierre-Simon Laplace (the Society's first president), Georges Cuvier, Charles Pierre Chapsal, Vivant Denon, Joseph Fourier, Gay-Lussac, Claude Louis Berthollet, Alexander von Humboldt, Jean-François Champollion, and François-René de Chateaubriand.

Most of the men of science who had accompanied Bonaparte in his Egyptian expedition are members: Edme-François Jomard, Conrad Malte-Brun, Jules Dumont d'Urville, Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert, Hottinguer, Henri Didot, Bottin and others such as Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès.

Alexander von Humboldt has spent the past twenty-three years in Paris and published a twenty-three-volume work describing the results of his explorations.

He leaves in 1827 for Berlin, where he is appointed chamberlain to the king of Prussia.

Alexander von Humboldt has been given the opportunity of setting on foot an extensive system of research in combination with his diligent personal observations, through the meeting at Berlin, on September 18, 1828, of a newly formed scientific association, of which the Prussian naturalist and explorer had been elected president.

His appeal to the Russian government in 1829 leads to the establishment of a line of magnetic and meteorological stations across northern Asia after Humboldt accepts the invitation of Tsar Nicholas to travel to Russia to conduct physiographic and geologic studies of the Urals and Siberia.

Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, a German naturalist, zoologist, comparative anatomist, and geologist who had been appointed professor of medicine at Berlin University in 1827, had accompanied Humboldt through eastern Russia to the Chinese frontier in 1829.

After his return, he begins to concentrate his studies on microscopic organisms, which until then had not been systematically studied, and establishes the genus Bacterium, employing a term formed from the Greek word “bacterion,” signifying a rod.

Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, born in 1782 at the end of the European Enlightenment, had become friends with two of its major figures: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a major comparative anthropologist under whom he studied biological sciences, and Alexander von Humboldt, who served as Maximilian's mentor.

Prince Max had joined the Prussian army in 1802 during the Napoleonic War, rising to the rank of Major-General.

On retiring from the army in 1815, Wied had led an expedition to southeast Brazil from 1815 to 1817, on his return writing Reise nach Brasilien (1820-21) and Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte von Brasilien (1825-33).

In July 1832, accompanied by a huntsman and taxidermist, David Dreidoppel, and the twenty-three-year-old Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, Weid lands in Boston, intending to embark on a journey up the Missouri River, studying the cultures of tribes such as the Mandan and the Hidatsa as well as the flora and fauna of the area.

The three had encountered hardships and delays caused largely by a cholera epidemic in the eastern states that had swept across the north to Michigan.

It is not until October 8th that the three begin their journey down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, arriving in Mt. Vernon, Indiana ten days later, then making their way to New Harmony.

Wied’s stay here is “prolonged by serious indisposition, nearly resembling cholera, to a four months’ winter residence.”

When the expedition is complete, Bodmer will return to Germany in 1834 with Prince Maximilian, then travel to Paris, where he will have many scenes from the expedition (eighty-one total) reproduced as aquatints.

The Prince will incorporate these images into his book, which will be published in London in 1839 as Reise in das Innere Nord-Amerikas (Travels in the Interior of North America).