August Fendler

August Fendler (born January 10, 1813 in Gumbinnen , † November 27, 1883 in Port of Spain , Trinidad ) was an East Prussian , German-American botanist . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is " Fendler ".

Live and act

August Fendler was the only child of wood and ivory - turner Mathias Fendler, who already died was the son of August only six months old. Two years later, his mother married a second time. At least one son came from this second marriage. Both half-brothers lived - at least for a few years - together in the USA and most recently in Trinidad.

Because of his poor family circumstances, Fendler initially received insufficient schooling, but was then sent to high school when he was twelve . Here he showed greater aptitude for mathematics, less for the ancient languages ​​Latin and Greek. After four years, when the parents ran into financial difficulties again, Fendler was withdrawn from school. He then worked as a municipal employee, but his longing for distant countries grew. The first opportunity presented itself to him as a scientist as an employee to an inspection trip to the cholera - Quarantine bearings at the Prussian took eastern border with Russia. Cholera first reached Europe in 1831 .

In 1834 he studied physics at the Royal Commercial Institute in Berlin , the per semester destitute from each Prussian province maximum of three, took up but talented candidates as fellows. Fendler had received a grant of 300 thalers for a period of three years. Despite his success at school, he was looking for a change again after a year and asked for his release, which he was granted.

In the fall of 1835 he wandered as a craft boy on the waltz through Silesia and Saxony to Frankfurt am Main , along the Rhine and finally to Bremen , where he embarked for Baltimore ( Maryland ) in the spring of 1836 .

In Baltimore he went ashore with very little money. So he worked for a few months in Philadelphia , then went to the coal mines in Pennsylvania , finally he came to New York City at the end of 1836 - without money and without friends - where he saw the first ocean liner " Sirius " and " Great Western " . He lost his job in a lamp shop in 1838 after the great economic crisis of 1837 . Fendler was on his way to St. Louis ( Missouri ), where he arrived after 30 days of travel.

Fendler's home in Allentown in 1907

In St. Louis he worked again for a lampmaker who supplied the town, which had around 13,000 inhabitants at the time, with kerosene lamps . The winter days were too cold for him, however, which is why he went south at Christmas 1838. Since the paddle steamers were stuck because of ice drifts, he hiked all the way on foot across the Mississippi River through Illinois , Kentucky and Tennessee to New Orleans . By now Texas had become a topic of conversation everywhere, so Fendler took a steamer to Galveston, Texas , where he arrived in January 1839. From there he moved on to Houston . But yellow fever broke out in Texas, and Fendler also fell ill. He decided to leave Texas and went back to Illinois in late 1839, where he worked as a teacher for a short time. After a while he made the decision to become a hermit in a deserted wilderness. He found what he was looking for on the approximately 4 km long uninhabited river island Wolf's Island near the small town of Wellington , on the Missouri River about 500 km upstream from St. Louis . There he set up an abandoned woodcutter's hut and lived as a hermit, benefiting from the abundance of game on the island. However, after six months the island was inundated by a flood; Fendler had to leave the island and narrowly escaped drowning.

In 1841 he paid a visit to his home town of Königsberg , where he made the acquaintance of Ernst Meyer , professor of botany at the university there and director of the botanical garden . This made Fendler the suggestion to collect plants for him against payment in the western USA. Fendler accepted this offer and immediately after his return to the USA began to collect plants that he had Georg Engelmann scientifically determine. During the Mexican-American War (1846) Engelmann sent him to Asa Gray . Equipped with a letter from the Secretary of War ordering Fendler safe conduct for himself and his plant collection, Fendler came to Santa Fe in New Mexico with the US Army . He is considered to be the first professional botanist in New Mexico. But he was only able to start collecting in spring 1847 and returned to St. Louis at the end of the year. In the following years he made expeditions to Panama and Arkansas from St. Louis .

At the end of 1853 Fendler went to Venezuela , where he bought a small farm near Colonia Tovar near Caracas . In Venezuela, he not only collected plants, but also conducted meteorological studies during his longer stay . Some of his observations were recorded in the Smithsonian Institution's 1857 annual report . Every now and then he returned to the USA (1855/1856) to exchange his findings with other botanists. Every year until his death he corresponded again and again with Asa Gray, on whose behalf he acted.

Returned to Missouri in 1858, he first settled near Seaford (Delaware) . From 1864 he began to work a piece of land near Allentown (Missouri) . After just seven years he sold it again and visited his home in Germany again in the spring of 1871. But the United States never let go of him - he had even been an officially naturalized US citizen for 24 years - he returned to the States and settled in Wilmington (Delaware) in 1873 to enjoy his old age there. He was now active as a "speculative physicist"; in 1874 he published a thin book " The Mechanism of the Universe ", which, however, was a failure. But the climate in Wilmington was not for him, he developed rheumatism and so he looked for a more pleasant climate.

Therefore he traveled to Port of Spain in Trinidad on May 11, 1877, where he arrived on June 3. Here, too, he continued to collect plants until he died on November 27, 1883.

Fendler was not only interested in botany: During his years in Wilmington he translated Goethe's “ Faust I ” into English. The manuscript has survived but was never printed.

Dedication names

The plant genus Fendlera and the species Echinocereus fendleri and Sphaeralcea fendleri are named after Fendler .

Fonts (selection)

• Meteorology of Colonia Tovar . Venezuela 1857
• The Mechanism of the Universe . 1874

literature

• William Marriott Canby: An Autobiography and Some Reminiscences of the Late August Fendler. I. In: Botanical Gazette . Volume 10, Number 6, 1885, pp. 285-290, (online).
• William Marriott Canby: An Autobiography and Some Reminiscences of the Late August Fendler. II. In: Botanical Gazette . Volume 10, Number 7, 1885, pp. 301-304, (online).
• William Marriott Canby: An Autobiography and Some Reminiscences of the late August Fendler. III. In: Botanical Gazette . Volume 10, Number 8, 1885, pp. 319-322, (online).
• Asa Gray : Plantae Fendlerianae Novi Mexicanae . In: Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Volume 4, pp. 1-116, (online) .
• Michael T. Stieber, Carla Lange: Augustus Fendler (1813–1883), Professional Plant Collector: Selected Correspondence with George Engelmann . In: Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden . Volume 73, Number 3, 1986, pp. 520-531, JSTOR: 2399191 .

Web links

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for August Fendler at the IPNI
• ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: biography )