Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland at the foot of the Chimborazo volcano, painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1810).

Between the 1820s and 1850s Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most widely admired public figures in the world. In the U.S., the name of this international renowned scholar has vanished from the ...

When Alexander von Humboldt (right) traveled to England in 1790, he met a young chemist named James Smithson, the founder of the Smithsonian. Humboldt's influence still resonates throughout the ...

Frederic Edwin Church, The Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1852, oil on canvas, 28 x 23 in. The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Gift of Thomas Fortune Ryan. “Alexander von Humboldt and ...

A scene from Andrea Wulf’s new book “The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt,” which depicts how Alexander von Humboldt was able to obtain electric eels to study their leaping attack behavior.

The father of nature writing, intrepid explorer, friend to revolutionaries and US presidents, Alexander von Humboldt was the original scholar adventurer. Fearlessly footloose and boundlessly curious, ...

Alexander von Humboldt was born on September 14, 1769. In his day, he was a globetrotting, convention-defying hero — one of the first recorded individuals to raise environmental concerns. To make him ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, by Julius Schrader, 1859. Behind Humboldt are the mountains of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Humboldt’s exploration of these peaks shaped his view of nature ...

The history seems barely credible. A Prussian aristocrat, born in 1769, works for five years as a mine inspector. After his mother’s death, he uses a good chunk of the family fortune on a five-year ...

Can we call the great German polymath, Alexander von Humboldt—an explorer, scientist, and widely read author whose long life spanned the eighteen and nineteenth centuries—a founder of ecology? Without ...

Frederic Edwin Church, The Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1852, oil on canvas, 28 x 23 in. The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Gift of Thomas Fortune Ryan. Media preview: Thursday, ...