"So great was Humboldt’s influence, the middle years of the nineteenth century are now considered the era of Humboldtian science"

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/humboldt-in-the-new-world

Humboldt in the New World

By Anna Maria Gillis | HUMANITIES, November/December 2012 | Volume 33, Number 6

"Alexander von Humboldt’s journey to becoming the preeminent scientist of his day had many possible starting points. But July 16,1799,  the day that he, a Prussian naturalist, and his friend Aimé Bonpland, a French botanist, disembarked from the Pizarro in the South American city of Cumaná, capital of Nueva Andalucía, is as good as any.

From Europe, the explorers carried the finest scientific equipment available and something even more valuable: Spanish passports. A boon rarely awarded to foreigners, the documents assured them safe passage through Spain’s New World viceroyalties and allowed them to “make astronomical observations, measure the height of mountains, collect whatever grew on the ground, and carry out any task that might advance the Sciences.”

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Darwin may well be the most famous of Humboldt’s scientific devotees, but Humboldt’s capacious understanding of the natural world and commitment to collecting vast numbers of data points and, most important, finding meaning in them, drew  legions of admirers, among them Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Franz Boas, and  Samuel  Morse. So great was Humboldt’s influence, the middle years of the nineteenth century are now considered the era of Humboldtian science."