Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was a Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of romantic philosophy. His quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography and his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. Contemporaries spoke of him as second in fame only to Napoleon. All over the Americas and the English-speaking world, municipalities are still named after him, along with mountain ranges, bays, waterfalls, three hundred plants, and more than one hundred animals. There is a Humboldt Glacier, a Humboldt Asteroid, a Humboldt Hog-nosed Skunk. Off the coast of Peru and Chile, the giant Humboldt Squid swims in the Humboldt Current and even on the moon there is an area called Mare Humboldtianum. Darwin called him the “greatest scientific traveler who ever lived.”