OSWALD HEER.! 
OswaLpD HEER, the most eminent investigator of the fossil 
plants and insects of the tertiary period, died on the 27th of 
September last, shortly after he had entered upon the seventy- 
fifth year of his age. 
He was born at the hamlet of Nieder-Utzwyl, in Canton 
St. Gallen, Switzerland, August 31, 1809, passed most of 
his youth at Matt, in Canton Glarus, where his father was 
the parish clergyman, pursued his academic and professional 
studies at the university of Halle, and was ordained as min- 
ister of the Gospel in the year 1831. The next year he went 
to Zurich, where he resided for the rest of his life. Here he 
studied medicine for a time, but soon devoted himself seri- 
ously to entomology and botany, of which he was fond from 
boyhood. In 1834 he became Privat-docent of these sciences ; 
in 1852, when the university of Zurich was developed, he be- 
came its professor of botany, and in 1855 he took a similar 
chair in the Polytechnicum. Most of his earlier publications 
were entomological ; and it was by the way of entomology that 
he entered upon his distinguished career as a paleontologist. 
His life-long friend, the eminent Escher von der Linth, ap- 
preciating his rare powers of observation, induced him to 
undertake the study of the fossil insects of the celebrated ter- 
tiary deposits of Oeningen. The results of his labors in this 
virgin field were published between the years 1847 and 1853. 
His attention had from the first been attracted to the plants 
associated with the insect remains. His first paleeo-botanical 
paper appeared in 1851; the three volumes of his “ Flora 
Tertiaria Helvetie ” were issued between 1855 and 1859; in 
1862 his memoir on the fossil flora of Bovey-Tracey (Eng- 
1 Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science, xix. 556. 
(1884.) 
