JOHANNES AUGUST CHRISTIAN RCEPER.! 
JOHANNES AuGust CHrisTIAN Raper died on the 17th 
of March, 1884, at the age of eighty-four. He had been for 
some time the oldest botanist we know of, at least the oldest 
botanical author ; for his first work, a monograph of the Ger- 
man species of Euphorbia, was published in 1824. He was 
director of the Botanic Garden at Basle in 1828, when he 
published his classical paper “‘ De Organis Plantarum,” and 
he may have been so in 1826, when he contributed to Seringe’s 
“ Mélanges Botaniques”’ his paper on the nature of flowers and 
inflorescences, which first put the latter upon a scientific basis 
and essentially established the present nomenclature. He was 
botanical professor there in 1830, when he published his tract 
“De Floribus et Affinitatibus Balsaminearum.”’ In these es- 
says he gave the promise of being one of the foremost morpho- 
logical botanists of the age. Some time before the year 1840 
he was translated to Rostock, where he held the botanical pro- 
fessorship for more than forty years, but without fulfilling the 
promise of his youth by additional contributions to the science 
of any considerable importance. There are, however, some 
articles from him in the “ Botanische Zeitung,” and other Ger- 
man periodicals, the latest in the year 1859. In 1851 he was 
chosen a Foreign Member of the Linnzan Society of London. 
We find no record of the time or place of his nativity, but we 
infer from a statement in the preface of his work on Euphorbia, 
which was published at Gottingen, that he was a German and 
not a Swiss. He is said to have been most amiable, and of 
deep religious convictions. 
1 American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., xxi. 22. (1886.) 
