Fritz Kurtz

This article deals with the botanist, for the officer see Friedrich Kurtz

Fritz Kurtz

Fritz Kurtz , Spanish Federico Kurtz (born March 6, 1854 in Berlin ; † August 23, 1920 in Córdoba , Argentina ), was a German-Argentinian botanist and paleobotanist. Its official botanical author's abbreviation is " Kurtz ".

Life

Kurtz attended the Royal Realschule in Berlin from 1861 with the Abitur in 1872. He was the son of a wealthy building contractor and was therefore financially relatively independent for a long time. He studied natural sciences and especially botany at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1879 under Paul Friedrich August Ascherson with a dissertation on plants in Western Siberia. Another teacher was Leopold Kny . Even as a student he was a member of the Botanical Association of the Province of Brandenburg, whose third secretary and librarian he was temporarily, and wrote articles in their communications. He bought large herbaria, for example from the African tropics, and expanded them with his own collections. He also hired assistants for this. From 1878 to 1880 he was the second assistant at the Botanical Garden in Berlin, but gave up because of disputes with the director August Wilhelm Eichler (wealthy by nature, he did not strictly adhere to working hours). For a few years he was assistant to Heinrich Ernst Beyrich and Wilhelm Dames at the university's mineralogical museum , where he dealt with palaeobotany, especially flora of the tertiary. Here, too, he got into trouble because of non-observance of the working hours and, on the mediation of Ascherson, to whom the professorship had previously been offered, went to the University of Cordóba in Argentina as a professor of botany in 1884 . He never returned to Europe. He retired in 1915, but had to sell his extensive and valuable herbarium, including paleontological collection and library, to the University of Cordóba while he was still alive (due to the lack of regular pension payments). He bequeathed his remaining assets to the German Aid and School Association in Argentina.

Among other things, he was known for working on arctic flora and worked on the collections of the brothers Aurel Krause and Arthur Krause in Alaska and the Chukchi Peninsula (Deutsche Geographische Blätter V, No. 4, 1882). He published on the history of the peanut as a crop and researched the flora of Argentina. According to his biographer Harms , although he was thorough and conscientious and a good systematist with known plants, he had his problems determining new plants based on inflorescences. In Argentina, Paul Günther Lorentz , his predecessor as professor in Cordòba, and his assistant Georg Hans Emmo Wolfgang Hieronymus had already put together large collections , but after Harms the processing by August Grisebach was not always certain. He himself collected for example in the east.

In the Gondwana layers from the Permian of San Luis in Argentina, he demonstrated a layer that was already known from the East Indies, which caused quite a stir at the time.

In Cordóba he was a colleague of a number of other German scholars ( Oscar Döring , Adolfo Doering , Wilhelm Bodenbender , with whom he was on excursions, Ludwig Brackebusch , Arthur von Seelstrang , professor of topography and mathematics).

Some plant species were named after him such as Indigofera kurtzii (Harms) and the genus Kurtzama ( O. Kuntze 1891).

literature

• H. Harms: Fritz Kurtz . In: Reports of the German Botanical Society . Volume 38, 1920, pp. 1078-1085.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kurtz, Fritz (Federico) (1854–1920) at the IPNI , accessed on January 6, 2020 (with a list of the plant names described)
2. ^ Kurtz: On the existence of lower Gondwanas in Argentina. In: Records of the Geological Survey of India . Volume 28, 1895, pp. 111-117