921.8 159 
I 
Steenstrup 
OHANNES JAPETUS SMITH STEENSTRUP was born on 
March 8, 1815, in the northern part of Jutland, in the 
district termed Thy, where his father was a parson. In the year 
1852 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 Linné’s 
“Systema Naturae,” of O. M. Miiller’s “ Prodromus zoologiae 
danicae,” were, I believe, alinost 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 Reinhardt, 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, 
Reinhardt, 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,” 
ete.—a work of great sagacity and acute observation, the first to 
elucidate the sequence of the different forest-vegetations charac- 
