Ernst Schmitz (priest)

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Ernst Schmitz (born May 18, 1845 in Rheydt ; died December 3, 1922 in Haifa ) was a German religious priest and naturalist .

Life

Schmitz attended the Collegium Marianum in Neuss , entered the Missionary Order of St. Vinzenz von Paul (Vinzentiner / Lazaristen) in Cologne and was ordained a priest here in 1869. He then worked as an inspector at the Rhenish Knight Academy in Bedburg until 1873 . As a result of the Kulturkampf he left the German Empire and taught at the Lazarist College in the diocese of Braga in Portugal from 1875 to 1879 . From 1879 he worked in Funchal on Madeirawhere he headed the episcopal college and seminary from 1881 to 1908. At the turn of the century he was seconded to Theux in Belgium for four years .

In Funchal he set up a scientific collection (today: Museu de História Natural da Madeira ) and researched Madeira's fauna. After specimens from this collection , Victor Ritter von Tschusi zu Schmidhoffen (1847-1924) described the pigeon Columba palumbus maderensis , a subspecies of the wood pigeon that died out in the 1920s, and Gregory Mathews in 1934 the Madeira petrel ( Pterodroma madeira ) from the 1904 Genus of the hook shearwater , which is on the red list today. In 1900 Ernst Hartert named the Madeira barn owl ( Tyto alba schmitzi , then Strix flammea schmitzi ), a subspecies of the barn owl , after Schmitz. In 1908 Schmitz was appointed director of his institutions in Palestine by the German Association of the Holy Land and in 1908 he opened a teachers 'seminar in the St. Paulus Hospice in Jerusalem , the pilgrims' house of the association, in which he himself taught French and English.

Richard Lydekker: Caracal (1896)
Hospice of the German Association in Tabgha

Here, too, Schmitz started a scientific collection, especially since he had brought part of his collection of stuffed birds and various types of wood from Madeira. His students were encouraged to collect objects in the area, and so ten other varieties of ants came together, among them the Rhoptromyrmex schmitzi (Hagioxenus Schmitzi Forel). Schmitz discovered a subspecies of the caracal in Palestine , which Paul Matschie described in Schmitz's honor in 1912 as Felis caracal schmitzi (today Caracal caracal schmitzi ). Schmitz published his results in the "Ornithological Yearbook", in the "Ornithological Monthly Reports" and the "Zeitschrift für Oologie", in various Portuguese magazines and in the Cologne People's Newspaper . The carpenter ant species Camponotus schmitzi was posthumously named after him by the Dutch entomologist August Starkcke .

Even before the beginning of World War I, he moved to the club hospice in Tabgha on the Sea of ​​Galilee and during the war he had to move to Damascus . In 1920 he took over the position of chaplain to the German Borromean sisters in Haifa.

image

Fonts (selection)

  • Catholic Germanness in Palestine . Freiburg i. Br.: Caritasverband fd Kath. Germany, 1913 DNB
  • The postal system in Palestine. In: The Holy Land. 58. 1914, No. 1, pp. 22-29. Reprinted in Turkey-Spiegel No. 113 (2015), pp. 3–12.
  • The Holy Land's postal services in 1914. In: The Holy Land Philatelist, No. 72 and 73 (1960), pp. 1436-9 and 1468-9. (English translation of The Postal Service in Palestine )

literature

  • Gunnar Anger:  Ernst Schmitz. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 23, Bautz, Nordhausen 2004, ISBN 3-88309-155-3 , Sp. 1294-1296.
  • Schmitz, E., CM & Nusselein, EW, (ed.). 1986. From my life: an old missionary chatting. Published from 1932-34 in seventeen continuations of the monthly newspaper of the German Lazarists "Sankt Vinzenz". Self-edition, Aachen.
  • Thomas Dellinger: Schmitz, Ernst Johann (in Portuguese)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rhoptromyrmex schmitzi , see Russian Wikipedia: ru: Rhoptromyrmex schmitzi
personal data
SURNAME Schmitz, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German priest and naturalist
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Rheydt
DATE OF DEATH December 3, 1922
Place of death Haifa