GEORGE ENGELMANN. 517 



to the University of Heidelberg in the year 1827, where he had as 

 fellow students and companions Karl Schiuiper and Alexander Braun. 

 With the latter he maintained an intimate friendship and correspond- 

 ence, interrupted only by the death of Braun in 1877. The former, 

 who manifested unusual genius as a philosojihical naturalist, after lay- 

 ing the foundations of phyllotaxy, to be built upon by Braun and 

 others, abandoned, tlirough some singular infirmity of temper, an 

 opening scientific career of the highest promise, upon which the three 

 young friends, Agassiz, Braun, and Schimper, and in his turn Engel- 

 mann, had zealously entered. 



Embarrassed by some troubles growing out of a political demon- 

 stration by the students at Heidelberg, Engelmann in the autumn of 

 1828 went to Berlin University for two years ; and thence to Wurz- 

 burg, where he took his degree of Doctor in Medicine in the summer 

 of 1831. His inaugural dissertation, De Anthohjsi Prodromus, which 

 he published at Frankfort in 1832, testifies to his early predilection 

 for Botany, and to his truly scientific turn of mind. It is a morpho- 

 logical dissertation, founded chiefly on the study of monstrosities, illus- 

 trated by five plates filled with his own drawings. It was therefore 

 quite in the line with the little treatise on the Metamorphosis of Plants, 

 published forty years before by another and the most distinguished 

 native of Frankfort, and it appeared so opportunely that it had the 

 honor of Goethe's notice and approval, Goethe's correspondent, 

 Madame von Willema, sent a copy to him only four weeks before his 

 death. Goethe responded, making kind inquiries after young En- 

 gelmann, who, he said, had completely apprehended his ideas of 

 vegetable morphology, and had shown such genius in their develop- 

 ment that he oflTered to place in this young botanist's hands the store 

 of unpublished notes and sketches which he had accumulated. 



The spring and summer of 1832 were passed at Paris in medical 

 and scientific studies, with Braun and Agassiz as companions, leading, 

 as he records, " a glorious life in scientific union, in spite of the 

 cholera.' Meanwhile, Dr. Engelmann's uncles had resolved to make 

 some land investments in the valley of the Mississip|)i, and he willingly 

 became their agent. At least one of the Ikmily was already settled in 

 Illinois, not far from St. Louis. Dr. Engelmann, sailing from Bremen 

 for Baltimore in September, joined his relatives in the course of the 

 winter, made many lonely and somewhat adventurous journeys on 

 horseback in Southern Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, which yielded 

 no other fruits than those of botanical exploration ; and finally he 

 established himself in the practice of medicine at St. Louis, late in the 



