Joseph Gardener

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Joseph Gärtner (around 1761)

Joseph Gärtner (born March 12, 1732 in Calw ; † July 14, 1791 in Tübingen ) was a German botanist and natural historian . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is “ Gaertn. ".

Life

His parents were the court doctor Joseph Gärtner (1707–1731) and his wife Eva Maria Wagner (1715–1743). His father had died before he was born. After the death of his mother as well, Joseph Gärtner was educated by a young theologian from the University of Tübingen , who taught him all the necessary basic knowledge. He broke off his law studies at the University of Tübingen , which he began in 1750, after only six months. At the University of Göttingen he studied medicine until 1753 and attended the lectures of Georg Gottlob Richter , Johann Gottfried Brendel , Johann Georg Roederer and Albrecht von Haller , who introduced him to anatomy , physiology and botany .

Gärtner dropped out at the age of 20 to devote himself to science. He traveled through Italy, then to Lyon , Montpellier and Paris in France. During his trip, he explored nature and sought advice from scholars of natural history and anatomy. In 1755 he spent a few months in England, then again in Paris. After his return home, he obtained his doctorate at the medical faculty of the University of Tübingen with a thesis De viis urinae ordinariis et extraordinariis . Then he devoted two years to mathematics, optics and mechanics; this proved to be fruitful insofar as he later made his own apparatus.

In 1759 he went to Holland and attended botanical lectures with Adriaan van Royen , with whom he became friends. To complete a thesis on fish and sea worms, he traveled to the coast of England. It was during this period that his treatise on some molluscs and another on zoophytes appeared in Spicilegia Zoologia . This was followed by further treatises on the anatomy of fish, on cryptogamic plants, on the fertilization and reproduction of u. a. Seaweed and ferns ( ferns ). He then spent another year in London and exchanged ideas with various naturalists.

In 1761 he returned to Tübingen via Amsterdam and was immediately appointed a member of the Royal Society in London. Shortly afterwards he was elected professor of anatomy in Tübingen.

The name Gärtner had made in England led to his acceptance among the members of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences and to the professor of botany and natural history there. Since at that time the study of plant fertilization had been neglected, he decided to make this the main subject of his consideration.

With the academy director Count Orlov and other scholars he went on a trip to Ukraine . Here he collected a large number of as yet unknown plants. On his return he was given responsibility for the garden and the Imperial Cabinet of Natural History. The time-consuming tasks of his position as an academic left him little room for travel, to exchange ideas with other scholars and to examine collections. In addition, he could not continue his main work as desired.

In the summer of 1770 he returned to his place of birth, Calw, so that he could start working on his main work without delay. But in the course of his work he noticed that he lacked the material for sufficient elaboration and that the plants he could get in Calw were not enough to continue his work as desired. In 1778 Gärtner traveled again to London, where Joseph Banks gave him access to the specimens he had collected on his world trips. A trip to Amsterdam followed to study the findings of the botanist H. Thunberg, who had just returned from his trip to Japan. He informed him of a large number of foreign plants and helped him to forward them to Calw.

On his return to Calw, he was threatened with vision loss due to a nervous disease and stopped working for nearly twenty months. He recovered almost completely, but his general health remained fragile. He revised his work On the Fruits and Seeds of Plants again extensively and published it in 1788, three years before his death.

He was not married, but had an extramarital relationship with Maria Rebekka Mütschelin. This came from the son Karl Friedrich, born in 1772 . He had already recognized him in 1773 and adopted him in 1787 as a child. His son built on his father's work and treated a.o. a. Attempts to cross thousands of different plants.

Honors

After Joseph Gärtner the genus Gaertnera Lam. from the plant family of the redness plants named (Rubiaceae).

Works

  • De fructibus et seminibus plantarum . 2 volumes. (Stuttgart, Tübingen 1789-1791). The work contains a careful description of the fruits and seeds of over 1000 plant genera. Digitized in Google Books

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ de viis urinae ordinariis et extraordinariis on Google books.
  2. ↑ Joseph Deleuze: About the life and works of Gärtner and Hedwig: translated from the French annals of the Museum of Natural History . Stuttgart 1805.
  3. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]
  4. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Joseph Gärtner. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 17, 2015 (Russian).

Web links

Wikisource: Joseph Gärtner  - Sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Gardener, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German botanist
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1732
PLACE OF BIRTH Calw
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 1791
Place of death Tübingen