SKETCH OF GEORGE ENGELMANN, M. D. 261 



ciated species, as well as with many other plants, of which perhaps 

 only the annals of botany may take account." 



George Exgelmaxx was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, February 

 2, 1809, and died in St. Louis, Missouri, February 4, 1884. He came 

 of a family of clergymen who had been settled for several generations 

 as pastors at Bacharach on the Rhine, and was the eldest of thirteen 

 children. His father was director of a school for girls at Frankfort. 

 He went through the usual course of gymnasia! instruction in that 

 city, and there acquired his taste for scientific studies, which was 

 stimulated under the inspiration given by the Leuckenberg Philo- 

 sophical Society, a body to which the journey of Rupell, one of its 

 members, in Nubia, Kordofan, Arabia Petrsea, and Abyssinia, had 

 given considerable renown. In the spring of 1827, when he was 

 eighteen years old, he entered the University of Heidelberg, where he 

 met as fellow-students Alexander Braun, who afterward became an 

 eminent botanist, and Carl Schimper, whose name is associated with 

 the early history of phyllotaxy. A close fellowship, which lasted 

 through Braun's life, sprang up between him and Braun, and they 

 were accustomed, at their evening meetings, to discuss questions of 

 the physiology and morphology of plants. Here he also met and 

 made friends with Agassiz, who afterward became a brother-in-law of 

 Braun's. In 1828 he removed, in consequence of a political incident 

 at Heidelberg, to the University of Berlin, whence, after two years of 

 residence there, he went to Wiirzburg, and there took the degree of 

 Doctor of Medicine in 1831. His graduating thesis, " De Antholysi 

 Prodromus" a morphological dissertation on the study of monstrosi- 

 ties, illustrated with his own drawings, was an important contribution 

 to teratology, and has held a prominent place in the literature of 

 morphology. Having been brought under the notice of Goethe, who 

 had forty years before published an essay on the morphology of 

 plants, only four weeks before his death, that great author testified 

 his appreciation of the mastery which the young botanist had attained 

 of the subject by offering to present to him the unpublished notes and 

 sketches which he had accumulated. Engelmann's original manu- 

 script of the thesis, with his drawings, is now preserved in the library 

 of the Herbarium of Harvard University. 



This pamphlet, written in Latin, and that not the most classic, has 

 been compared, in " Nature," by Mr. Maxwell F. Masters, with the 

 more elaborate " lemens de Teratologic Vegetale " of Moquin-Tan- 

 don, written nearly ten years later, or in 1841. Moquin's work, says 

 Mr. Masters, " is written in a style which even a foreigner can read 

 with pleasure. Its method, too, is clear and symmetrical ; but when 

 we compare the two works from a philosophical point of view, and 

 consider that the one was a mere college essay, while the other was the 

 work of a professed botanist, we must admit that Engelmann's treatise, 

 so far as it goes, affords evidence of a deeper insight into the nature 



