LIFE AND WRITINGS OF M. DE MARTIUS. 363 



of his life, by renouncing tlie functions of public instructor, which he 

 had held for thirty-three years, with the view to devoting all his ener- 

 gies to one single publication, and to the Secretaryship of the Academy. 

 It is natural for his friends and pupils, and for all those botanists who 

 have benefited by his labours, to Avish to review a career which, though 

 still unfinished, has been meritoriously filled. We owe this homage to 

 one of our guides, whose labours suggest many useful reflections on 

 the present state of European Botany. 



Dr. Charles Frederic-Philippe de Martius was bom at Erlangen on 

 the 17th of April^ 1794. The Latin termination of his name is not 

 an unusual thing in Germany, but is often connected with literary pa- 

 rentage, and with a period when authors wrote everything, even their 

 own names, in the classic tongue : it may be deemed the stamp of 

 intellectual pedigree. Galeottus Martius, a native of Ravenna, was in 

 1428 the librarian of the famous Hungarian King, Matthias Corvinus, 

 and he was one of the ancestors of our botanist, whose grand-uncle, 



m 



again, Henry de Martius, published in 1812 a * Flora of Moscow,* of 

 which the entire first edition, except two copies, was destroyed in the 

 conflagration of Moscow- His father, Ernest William, who died in 

 1849, at a very advanced age, had been, in conjunction with Hoppe, 

 one of the three founders of the Ratisbon Botanical Society : he wrote 

 a • Journey in Franconia and Thuringia,' bearing chiefly upon Minera- 

 logy and Natural History^ and towards the close of his life he pub- 

 lished a volume, entitled 'Souvenirs of a Nonagenarian,' which contains 

 many interesting pictures of social life in Germany during the eighteenth 

 century. Finally, the brother of M. de Martius is Professor of Materia 

 Medica in the University of Erlangen, 



The young Philippe de Martius enjoyed the advantage of pursuing the 

 study of Natural History and Medicine in his native town, guided by 

 his father and his father's friends. He was the botanical pupil of 

 Schreber, who had studied under Linnaeus. To the latter circumstance 

 may be in a measure due the clearness of his descriptions, his correct 

 notions on the nature of genera and species, and his generalizing turn 

 of mind. From an early age there was no branch of knowledge which 

 he did not seek to acquire; Zoology under Goldfuss, Chemistry under 

 Hildebrand, Philology under Harless, Philosophy under IMehmes and 

 Vogel; he studied all with attention, or rather with enthusiasm, for he 

 had as strong a bent for arts and literature as for positive science. Tim 



