921.8 150 



Steenstrup 



JOHANNES JAPETUS SMITH STEENSTEUP was born on 

 March 8, 1813, in the northern part of Jutland, in the 

 district termed Thy, where his father was a parson. In the year 

 1832 he was sent from the cathedral - school of his native 

 province at Aalborg to be a student at the University of 

 Copenhagen. In two succeeding years (1833-35) he was obliged 

 to remain in the paternal home, occupied with teaching his 

 younger brothers and with natural history excursions into his 

 native country, collecting numerous examples of its interesting 

 natural productions, its plants and animals, its fossils and geological 

 features. Of scientific facilities or aids he had very little ; a copy 

 of the published parts of the celebrated " Flora Danica," of Linne's 

 " Sy sterna Naturae," of 0. M. Miiller's " Prodromus zoologiae 

 danicae," were, I believe, almost the only books of science avail- 

 able for Steenstrup in these early times of his scientific self- 

 training and self- education ; his only helper at this time being a 

 gifted parson, his uncle, formerly a pupil, especially in botany and 

 entomology, of the renowned naturalist and teacher Melchior, at the 

 college of Herlufsholm. After his return to the university in 1835, 

 in the full bloom of a self-made young naturalist, he became the 

 pupil and friend of Schouw, the botanist, of Forchammer, the 

 geologist, and of Eeinhardt, sen., the zoologist, whose ingenious 

 lectures left an impression on Steenstrup's mind never to be effaced. 

 Among the particular friends of those days of his youth were the 

 gifted botanist Drejer, lost at an early age, Liebmann, Schouw's 

 successor as Professor of Botany after his return from Mexico, 

 Eeinhardt, jun., the celebrated zoologist and traveller in Brazil, etc. 

 Only two years after his return to the university Steenstrup earned 

 the honours for two prize essays, the one (never published, only 

 epitomised in my text-book, " Dyreriget," and therefrom in Palmen's 

 work on the migrations of birds), " on the differences between the 

 wanderings of birds and fishes," the other, published afterwards 

 (1842) in the Transactions of the Danish Academy of Science, 

 " on the geological investigation of certain forest-moors on Seeland," 

 etc. — a work of great sagacity and acute observation, the first to 

 elucidate the sequence of the different forest-vegetations charac- 



