Alexander von Humboldt's De distributione geographica plantarum (1817) is rightly considered a milestone in the quantitative treatment of taxonomy and biogeography. In this paper, I aim to uncover the contextual and infrastructural conditions that enabled Humboldt to endorse this new approach. For this, I will focus on the work of Karl Ludwig Willdenow, who was Humboldt's botanical mentor in the 1780s, and Karl Sigismund Kunth, a merchant's clerk who served as Humboldt's personal assistant in Paris from 1813 to 1820. Both Willdenow and Kunth were immersed in cameralist projects of exploring domestic and exotic resources for the promotion of Prussia's economy, and both had particular skills in designing paper technologies to record and process information on plants and animals. These technologies allowed for a form of observation that was at once detailed and bound by strict, Linnaean convention, a combination that inadvertently suggested new objects of research. The new perspective on "dynamic relationships among organisms, and between organisms and their environment" that characterizes nineteenth-century biology (Nyhart) can thus be seen as directly related, rather than opposed to, the Linnaean tradition.