SKETCH OF OSWALD HEER. 551 



was appointed a teacher of physics, botany, and mineralogy, in the 

 High-School of Zurich. In October, 1835, he was appointed Professor 

 Extraordinary of Botany and Entomology, in the same school, and his 

 position and career were fixed for life. He became Professor of Botany 

 in the university when it was founded, in 1852, and in the Polytech- 

 nicum in 1855. He founded the Botanic Garden of Zurich, and became 

 its director, and became President of the Society of Agriculture and 

 Horticulture in 1845. For twenty years he was a Rathsherr, or mem- 

 ber of the Grand Council of the city. He was elected to the American 

 Academy of Sciences in 1877. 



The general character and value of Professor Heer's scientific work 

 are expressed in the commendations passed upon it by the Marquis de 

 Saporta and others, extracts from which are given at the beginning of 

 the present sketch. His scientific publications, according to the list 

 given in the " Botanisches Centralblatt " in 1884, are seventy-seven 

 in number, besides the seven quarto volumes of the "Flora Fossilis 

 Arctica," which comprise a considerable number of independent 

 memoirs. They are in the departments of entomology, botany, and 

 palseo-botany. Following shortly after his first published paper, al- 

 ready mentioned as communicated to the Physical Society of Zurich, 

 were two memoirs published in his geographical magazine, on the 

 geographical distribution of insects and plants in the Swiss Alps, the 

 former paper of which was afterward expanded into a memoir on the 

 Swiss Coleoptera. From this time on his labors were continuous ; as 

 M. de Saporta remarks, they touch and are interlinked, and nothing 

 interrupts them. Beginning with the study of insects, as we have 

 seen, he was led naturally to regard flowers, the habitual haunts of 

 insects, and thence to the examination of the fossil insects and plants 

 of (Eningen, whence his labors expanded to embrace the fossil flora 

 of the world. His attention was first directed to the tertiary beds of 

 (Eningen, by his friend Escher von der Linth. These beds are situ- 

 ated not far from Zurich, on the right bank of the Rhine, near where 

 it issues from the Lake of Constance, and include in a series of thin 

 sheets, like leaves of paper, innumerable impressions of insects and 

 plants. Scheuchzer had found there, nearly a hundred years before, a 

 skeleton which he took to be of one of the victims of the flood, but 

 which Cuvier determined to be a salamander, and later naturalists to 

 be a congener of species now existing in the fresh waters of Japan 

 and in the American lakes. More than six hundred species of plants 

 and a thousand insects have been found in these beds and described 

 by Heer, the chief results of whose labors upon them were published 

 between 1847 and 1853. He devoted three large works to accounts of 

 the ancient flora and the geological past of Switzerland. The first 

 was the "Flora Tertiaria Helvetia?," which appeared 1855-1859, in 

 three volumes, with one hundred and fifty-six plates ; next was the 

 " Urwelt der Schweitz," in 1865, which was translated into six Ian- 



