Daniel Rolander

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Daniel Rolander (* 1723 in Hälleberga , Småland ; † August 10, 1793 in Lund ) was a Swedish naturalist and student of Carl von Linné .

Life

Little is known about Daniel Rolander's parents; it is assumed that his father was a farmer. He attended elementary school and high school in Växjö (1736–1741) and from 1741 to 1754 the University of Uppsala . From 1744 Daniel Rolander was trained at Uppsala University by Carl von Linné. He never defended a dissertation, but published five entomological papers. Right from the start he was an expert in the field of entomology . Linnaeus must have been very impressed by the young man because he also made him the teacher of his son Carl .

Map of Suriname, 1771
Quassia amara
Colony of cochineal scallops on an opuntia

In 1754 he placed him as a teacher for the children of the Swedish lieutenant colonel Carl Dahlberg on his plantations in Suriname . But on the way there he fell ill. It was not until April 1755 that he had recovered to the point where he could venture to South America. He arrived there on June 20, 1755. From Paramaribo he roamed the area. A dangerous venture, tropical diseases and a war with runaway slaves made the area unsafe. This and his deteriorating health ultimately caused him to leave Surinam again. In view of the amount of collected preparations, the variety of which he was astonished at, and the scientific notes he made, he seems to have hardly performed his task as a tutor in these seven months. He embarked on January 20, 1756 and reached Texel on April 14, 1756 . He got as far as Germany when he ran out of money. It took a while before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sent him money and so he reached Stockholm in October 1756, where he gave parts of his collection, for example three copies of the Quassia amara coveted by Linnaeus, to his sponsor. The fact that Linnaeus named the plant after the Negro slave named Quassia , who had sold the secret of its abilities as bitters or fever cure to Rolander for a certain sum, is said to have angered Dahlberg, who was hoping for fame for himself.

Linnaeus really wanted to see all of his samples and research results from Suriname, but Rolander refused to do so. This began his conflict with Linnaeus. This went so far that after a few months Linnaeus broke into Rolander's room and stole some specimens that were particularly interesting to him. The resulting rift between the two scientists was never to be overcome, which ultimately sealed Rolander's scientific career. In his descriptions, Terry Breverton turns it into a scientific anecdote that Linnaeus partially defends and was based on a chain of misunderstandings. Rolander had brought him home in the hope that Linnaeus would name a small, interesting species of beetle that he discovered that lived on Opuntia cacti after him. However, his teacher was away from home, whereupon Rolander left the living male and female specimens in a jar and one of their surrounding plants, trusting his garden house. Unknowingly, Linnaeus Gärtner would have destroyed them as supposed pests by taking the plant out of the container, removing the dirt and thus the insects, and thus eliminating the beetles. Who was himself keenly interested in these specimens Linnaeus, then protected a migraine before and Rolander was beside himself: the species that may Dactylopius rolander can have hot, is now considered Dactylopius coccus , that is the cochineal , respectively.

In 1757, Rolander became curator of the gardens at Seraphim Hospital in Stockholm. The position was not intended for a university or for an entomologist , as Rolander saw himself as. Nonetheless, his trip and his published results in 1758 were recognized in Germany. In 1761 he left the post, actually to become a professor in Stockholm, which was thwarted by Linnaeus. Instead, he went to Denmark to try his luck there. Again he was unsuccessful, but he sold his samples and records to the Danish biologist and medical doctor Christian Friis Rottbøll . Rottbøll viewed the material and published over 40 descriptions. Rolander's records disappeared in the archives of the Botanical Library of the Danish Museum of Natural History, the 700 pages of his notes written in difficult Latin, and his collection scattered across collections. The value of his records in South America was only achieved in the 19th century through the research of Alexander von Humboldt .

Rolander had returned to Sweden in 1765. With the help of a few friends, he was able to retire in Lund. According to other sources, he died lonely in the poor house .

In his honor, a genus of the Vernonieae was later named, in earlier times a species of beetle that lived in South America and the West Indies.

Rolander's manuscript

The manuscript bought from Christen Friis Rottbøll is 699 pages long and written in Latin. Part of the text was published in 1811 as Diarium surinamense, quod sub itinere exotico conscripsit Daniel Rolander . James Dobreff - a Latin expert at Lund University - worked with his colleagues on an English translation that was published with the help of the private IK Foundation in 2008 as The Linnaeus Apostles - Global Science and Adventure: Daniel Rolander's Journal . According to New Scientist , the publication by Lars Nansen was imminent. Dobreff is currently working on a historical-critical edition of the original Latin text. Even in the run-up to the publication, the editors were impressed by the accurate level of detail in ROLANDER's scientific descriptions and emphasized his scientific rank, whereby he proved to be on a par with his contemporaries: “Rolander in his diary proved he was a well-prepared and skilled biologist. His perspicacity and knowledge of the literature available at his time permitted him to recognize correctly several undescribed species, in addition to the others he had also classified usually in agreement to the published works of pre-Linnaean authors, Linnaeus himself, and contemporaries. "

Aphanus rolandri

In 1768 Linnaeus named the small ground bug Aphanus rolandri after Daniel Rolander. Aphanus means something like "inconspicuous" in German.

Source edition

  • Lars Hansen (Ed.): The Linnaeus Apostles. Global Science & Adventure, - Europe, North- South America. Volume Three, Book Three. Pehr Löfling, Daniel Rolander. IK Foundation, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-904145-20-2 .

literature

  • James Dobreff: The Invisible Naturalist. In: Systema Naturae 250 - The Linnaean Ark. Edited by Andrew Polaszek. CRC Press 2010, pp. 11-28. ISBN 978-1-4200-9501-2 .
  • Pedro Luís Rodrigues De Moraes, James Dobreff, Lars Gunnar Reinhammar, Olof Ryding: Current Taxonomic Status of Daniel Rolander's Species Published by Rottbøll in 1776. In: Harvard Papers in Botany January 15 , 2010, pp. 179-188.
  • Stephanie Pain: The Forgotten Apostle in: New Scientist Vol. 195 No. 2615 (August 4, 2007) pp. 41-45.
  • Sverker Sörlin / Otto Fagerstedt: Linné och hans apostlar. Örebrö 2004, ISBN 978-9-127-35590-3 .
  • Pedro Luís Rodrigues de Moraes, James Dobreff & Lars Gunnar Reinhammar: The plants by Daniel Rolander (c. 1723–1793) in Diarium Surinamicum (1754–1765) and herbaria . Phytotaxa 165 (1): 001-101 (April 16, 2014)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon, Vol. 30 (1998-2000), p. 287.
  2. ↑ according to other information around 1722. See Dobreff, 2010.
  3. ^ Robert R. Dunn / Matthew C. Fitzpatrick: Everey Species Is an Insect (or Nearly So): On Insects, Climate Change, Extinction, and the Biological Unknown. In: Lee Hannah (Ed.) Saving a Million Species: Extinction Risk from Climate Change. Island Press, Washington, DC 2012, p. 217.
  4. ↑ a b c d Edward O. Wilson, José M. Gómez Durán: Kingdom of ants. José Celestino Mutis and the dawn of natural history in the New World. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2010, p. 24.
  5. ^ William Rhind: A history of the vegetable kingdom. Blackie & Son, Glasgow / London 1841 p. 523.
  6. ^ Londa Schiebinger: Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2008, p. 213.
  7. ↑ Terry Breverton: Breverton's Encyclopedia of Inventions: A Compendium of Technological Leaps, Groundbreaking Discoveries and Scientific Breakthroughs that Changed the World . Quercus 2012, p. 269.
  8. ^ Cf. Richard Pulteney, Carl Troilius: A general view of the writings of Linnæus. London 1805, p. 548.
  9. ↑ For Linnaeus himself it would have been one of the greatest frustrations of his life, cf. Wilfrid Blunt: Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist. Frances Lincoln, London 2004, p. 211.
  10. ↑ Göttingen scholarly advertisements from scholarly things under the supervision of the Royal. Society of Sciences. Vol. 1, 56th piece, May 11, 1758, Pockwitz and Barmeier, Göttingen, p. 543.
  11. ↑ Eva Bäckstedt: Linnaeus okände lärjunge. In: Svenska Dagbladet culture. June 11, 2007. Retrieved June 1, 2012.
  12. ↑ William Nicholson: American edition of the British encyclopedia: or, Dictionary of Arts and sciences; Comprising an accurate and popular view of the present improved state of human knowledge . Volume 10, Ames & White, Mitchell 1821, p. 22.
  13. ↑ New Scientist , Vol. 195, No. 2615, 2007, p. 45.
  14. ^ The Linnaeus Apostles - Global Science and Adventure: Daniel Rolander's Journal. Translated by James Dobreff, David Morgan, Claes Dahlman and Joseph Ipton. Edited by Lars Nansen, Ik Foundation 2008.
  15. ↑ Jeremy Hance: Carl Linnaeus's forgotten apostle rediscovered: an ecological account of 18th Century Suriname. At: news.mongabay.com. August 11, 2008. Retrieved June 1, 2012.
  16. ↑ http://www.ikfoundation.org/linnaeus/volume-three.html
personal data
SURNAME Rolander, Daniel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish naturalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1723
PLACE OF BIRTH Hallsberga , Småland
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1793
Place of death Lund