Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt was born on 14 September 1769 in Berlin and died there on 6 May 1859. Between 1799 and 1804 he traveled through Latin America with the botanist Aime Bonpland, measuring how temperature, altitude, humidity and atmospheric pressure varied together and correlated with the plant and animal life found at each elevation, work distilled into the 1807 Essay on the Geography of Plants and its cross section of the volcano Chimborazo. His demonstration that physical conditions determine the distribution of life across the globe is generally credited with founding biogeography as a science and shaped the ecological thinking of later naturalists including Charles Darwin.