Hipólito Ruiz López, or Hipólito Ruiz, was a Spanish botanist known for researching the floras of Peru and Chile during an expedition under Carlos III from 1777 to 1788. During the reign of Carlos III, three major botanical expeditions were sent to the New World; Ruiz and José Antonio Pavón Jiménez were the botanists for the first of these expeditions, to Peru and Chile.
Title page, Flora Peruviana, et Chilensis
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler (1843)
Humboldt as a boy with his widowed mother, Maria Elisabeth (Colomb) von Humboldt
The Tegel Palace, Berlin, where Alexander and his brother Wilhelm lived for several years
Schiller, Wilhelm, and Alexander von Humboldt with Goethe in Jena