Heinrich Sylvester Theodor Tiling

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Heinrich Sylvester Theodor Tiling (born December 31, 1818 in Wilkenhof , Livonia , now Latvia ; † December 6, 1871 in Nevada City , USA ) was a German-Baltic doctor and naturalist . He later took on American citizenship .

Juggler flower ( Mimulus tilingii )

Live and act

His parents were Johann Heinrich Tiling and Margarete, née Pearson of Balmadis. Heinrich Sylvester Theodor Tiling went to school in Riga and studied medicine in Dorpat from 1838 to 1844 , where he received his doctorate in 1844 . Tiling was a doctor of the Russian North American Co. in Ajan , Siberia from 1845 to 1851. From 1853 to 1854 he was a doctor in Riga, from 1854 to 1863 a doctor in Wenden and from 1863 to 1868 in Sitka , Alaska. He then practiced as a doctor in San Francisco and Nevada City (USA). He collected and described numerous plant species in Siberia, Alaska and California from 1840 to 1871, such as the juggler flower ( Mimulus tilingii ) native to North America .

Immediately after completing his doctorate, he was offered the opportunity to work as a doctor for the Russian-American Company in the company's new main port on the Sea of ​​Okhotsk , Ajan. Immediately after completing his doctorate, he married Anna Elisabeth Fehrmann. This accompanied him on the land trip to Siberia. Tiling didn't learn Russian until he was traveling to his new place of work. The trip apparently took longer than expected and winter was falling. The travelers reached Ajan with difficulty on December 4, 1844, and Tiling began its business. At that time, Ajan had a population of about 100 and medical work only took about an hour a day. This allowed Tiling to devote himself to his observational scientific activity. An example of this are the temperature tables for Ajan, which were created from 1847 onwards. He measured the temperature three times a day (at 7 a.m., 2 p.m. and 9 p.m.), calculated monthly averages, and monthly maximum and minimum temperatures. In addition, the cloud cover, the barometer reading and the wind direction were documented. Tiling intensively collected plants only in the immediate vicinity of Ajan's.

After his return to Europe, Tiling first practiced in Riga. In 1854 he became a doctor at the Wendenen District Administration, a position he held until he left for Russian America.

From 1863 to 1868 Tiling was an employed physician with the Russian-American Company in Sitka , Alaska. Tiling was second married to Anna Catharina Dolch, who had come to Alaska with him. The marriage took place in the Sitka Lutheran Church.

At a later date, Tiling went to Nevada City, California, where he also practiced as a doctor. In Sitka as well as in Nevada City he continued to collect and determine plants and kept in contact with his acquaintances in St. Petersburg, who published the news about the plants in Europe he had identified.

Appreciation

Obviously, the collection and categorization of plants was close to his heart. This passion accompanied him all his life. He sent plants, seeds and descriptions back to Europe from his various abodes. Lange and Gumprecht, the reviewers of “A Journey Around the World ...”, praise him for popularizing the beautifully blooming and endemic Ajan “ Weigela Middendorfiana”, a garden shrub. In addition, Regel wrote: “Dr. In general, it is Tiling, to whom culture owes the introduction of many excellent plants from Siberia. ”Lange and Gumprecht's reviews go well beyond a short book review and contain information about Tiling's journey that is not contained in the original they have reviewed. The length of 21 pages is also remarkable. Although "A Journey Around the World" was published anonymously, the reviewers knew and named the author and greatly appreciated his presentation. The authorship seems to have been known at least among the German-speaking "connoisseurs". Certainly there was a letter contact or a conversation between the author and the knowledgeable reviewer before the review. Tiling's exchange with the then director of the botanical garden in St. Petersburg Eduard von Regel , with whom he published his Florula Ajanensis, was particularly intense .

Trained as a doctor and concerned with the study of plants, his interests went beyond his narrow specialist area. So he made daily meteorological records of the weather in Ajan for about four years. This is probably the earliest systematic weather record in Eastern Siberia. Through the scientifically trained view of different parts of the world, Tiling formed an image of the development of our world that appears highly modern today (2010). At the beginning of his lecture on the inhabitants of the sea , which he gave in Riga after his return from Ajan, he went into the differences in biodiversity in different parts of the sea. The Baltic keeps it from personal experience for one of the types poorest inland seas. That is a scientific truism today. He mentions the Steller manatee as the best-known example of the extinction of species : “… - we recently saw the complete extermination of a sea animal and that in a sea that we would have to consider large enough to provide refuge for its haunted inhabitants to be able to perform ... ".

He vividly described the great biodiversity of marine animals and the large number of individuals in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk near his former home Ajan. He combined this knowledge with what he saw on his return voyage 1851-1852 as a ship's doctor from Ajan via Sakhalin , Kamchatka , Sitka , Hawaii , Tahiti , around Cape Horn and through the Atlantic back to Kronstadt and compared it with the situation in the Baltic Sea and came to the following conclusion: "... Add to this the flocks of sea lions, fur seals and walruses, which are found in some places, and you will confess that we owe the dead calm to the extinction of these animals in our Baltic Sea, which the sight of the sea brings to awaken us. In a sense, we have only left the great frame of the giant picture which the Creator has put in front of our eyes in the sea. ”With this he formulated concerns of the ecological movement of our day as early as 1854.

Dedication names, descriptions

False snow parsley ( Tilingia ajanensis )

The plant genus Tilingia Regel & Tiling is named in his honor. In addition, more than 20 species have been named after him; including:

Asteraceae
Brassicaceae
Convallariaceae
Leguminosae

According to IPNI, Tiling's author abbreviation is mentioned in over 40 entries for plant descriptions.

Publications (selection)

  • (anonymous): A journey around the world from west to east through the calm and Atlantic sea . Verlag von C. Krebs, Aschaffenburg 1854 Digitized
  • with E. Regel: Florula Ajanensis, listing of the phanerogams and higher cryptogams growing in the vicinity of Ajan, together with a description of some new species and illumination of related plants . University printing press, Moscow 1858
  • About the inhabitants of the sea. Popular lecture given at the Natural Research Association in Riga on March 12, 1854 . In: Literary paperback of the Germans in Russia . Edited by Jegór von Sivers. Published by N. Kymmel , Riga 1858, pp. 130 ff.

literature

  • H. Lange, TE Gumprecht: Review of "Journey around the world from west to east through Siberia and the calm and Atlantic sea" . In: Journal for General Geography Vol. 4, 1855, pp. 428 ff. And p. 481 ff.
  • Isidorus Brennsohn: The doctors of Livonia from the oldest times to the present . E. Bruns, Riga 1905, p. 398 ( digitized version ).
  • Hans Arnold Plöhn: The Lower Saxon Genders Tiling. In: German family tables in list form, Vol. 6, Leipzig 1937, pp. 85-103.
  • John Hendley Barnhart: Biographical Notes upon Botanists . GK Hall & Co., Boston 1965, pp.?.
  • Carola L. Gottzmann , Petra Hörner: Lexicon of the German-language literature of the Baltic States and St. Petersburg . De Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-019338-1 , p. 1311-1312 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A journey around the world from west to east through the calm and Atlantic sea . Verlag von C. Krebs, Aschaffenburg 1854, p. 57.
  2. ↑ Florula Ajanensis, listing of the phanerogams and higher cryptogams growing in the vicinity of Ajan, together with a description of some new species and illumination of related plants . Universitaets-Buchdruckerei, Moscow 1858, p. 618 ff.
  3. ↑ Maria Jarlsdotter Enckell: In Search of a Lost People: The Finns in Russian America and Their Descendants . 2010 ( PDF  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / 2010rac.com  
  4. ↑ See, among other things, the review by H. Lange and TE Gumprecht on "A journey around the world ..." In: Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Erdkunde Vol. 4, 1855, p. 490.
  5. ↑ ibid
  6. ↑ ER (di Eduard Regel): Sedum Rhodiola DC lanceolatum Rgl. Et Tiling , in: Eduard Regel (Hrsg.): Gartenflora . Erlangen 1863, p. 211.
  7. ↑ ibid, p. 497.
  8. ↑ Florula Ajanensis , p. 11 ff.
  9. ↑ a b About the inhabitants of the sea. Popular lecture given at the Natural Research Association in Riga on March 12, 1854 . In: Literary paperback of the Germans in Russia . Edited by Jegór von Sivers. Publisher by N. Kymmel , Riga 1858, p. 134.
  10. ^ Nouveau Mémoires de la Société Impériale des Naturalistes de Moscou 11: 97, 1859 (IK).
  11. ↑ International Plant Names Index [1]
  12. ↑ Bull. Princ. Bot. Gard. Acad. Sci. URSS No. 60, 40 (1965). (IK)
  13. ↑ Botanicheskie Materialy Gerbariya Botanicheskogo Instituti Imeni VL Komarova Akademii Nauk SSSR 19: 495. 1959 (IK)
  14. ↑ Bot. Zhurn. (Moscow & Leningrad) 88 (11): 132. 25 nov 2003
  15. ↑ Novosti Sistematiki Vysshikh Rastenii 19: 106 (1982) :. (IK)
  16. ↑ Nouveau Mémoires de la Société Impériale des Naturalistes de Moscou 11: 61, 1859 (IK)
  17. ↑ Revis. Gene. Pl. (1891) 935. (IK)
  18. ↑ thesis Crucif. 133. (IK)
  19. ↑ Byulleten 'Glavnogo Botaniceskogo Sada 113: 36 (1979). (IK)
  20. ↑ Hardy Bulbs, ii. 536 (1938). (IK)
  21. ^ Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg , Ser. 7. xxii. (1874) I. 94. (IK)
  22. ↑ Revis. Gene. Pl. (1891) 207. (IK)
personal data
SURNAME Tiling, Heinrich Sylvester Theodor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic-American doctor and naturalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1818
PLACE OF BIRTH Wilkenhof , Livonia
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1871
Place of death Nevada City , USA