While Wilhelm’s studiousness put him on the fast track in training for a high public office, Alexander’s restlessness and outdoor wanderings—collecting and labeling beetles, flowers, shells, and stones were favorite pastimes—led his mother to choose for “the little apothecary” a more bureaucratic career. In 1789, he matriculated at Göttingen University, where he met and formed a strong friendship with naturalist-ethnologist-revolutionary Georg Forster, who had accompanied his father on Captain James Cook’s second voyage of exploration around the world. After spending time with Forster, traveling to London and back through revolutionary Paris, Humboldt seemed to have found his calling: thereafter he pursued a relentless, self-imposed program of study, both curricular and extracurricular, to become a scientific explorer himself. He studied commerce, geology, botany, foreign languages, anatomy, astronomy, and scientific instruments as if possessed by a demon. Among his prominent instructors were geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, anatomist Justus Christian Loder, and astronomers Franz Xaver von Zach and Johann Gottfried Köhler. Throughout his life, Humboldt would meet and correspond with an unprecedented number of important figures in a wide range of disciplines.