Professor Oswald Hcer. 87 



selling extensive collections of these fossils for the College 

 Miiscinn of his father's friend, Professor Van Breda, at 

 Ilaarlein, in Uolland. Heer exercised the functions of a 

 village pastor for scarce a year, when he entered on his 

 long career as a professional scientist. The tall, gaunt, 

 narrow-shouldered valetudinarian, with quick eyes and 

 somewhat clerical mien, was henceforth to be pointed out 

 as a celebrity to the Zurich visitant, whilst his friendship 

 was to be prized by the leaders of science. 



Heer's life work is marked into two great epochs. The 

 first twelve years of his scientific career were devoted 

 to active observation, and much organising. His latter 

 years were those of a valetudinarian. Though he attained 

 a good age, lie battled from a boy with a delicate constitu- 

 tion, which eventually mastered him through the greater 

 part of his manhood. During the first period, living nature, 

 specially in its departments of insects and plants, were 

 studied ; palajobotany was the almost exclusive occupa- 

 tion of the closing years. 



In 1835 Heer founded the Botanical Garden at Zuricli, 

 being its first director. In the following year he be- 

 came Professor of Botany and Entomology in the Uni- 

 versity of Zurich. When the Polytechnicon of that city 

 was founded in 1855, his services as Botanical Professor 

 were transferred to it. He founded the Zurich Society of 

 Agriculture and Horticulture in 1845, and was its first 

 president. He had the qualities which combine to make a 

 popular public man, and for twenty years he was a Rath- 

 shern, or member of the Grand Council of his adopted city. 

 Early in this period he published two remarkable essays 

 on the geographic distribution of insects and plants of the 

 Alps in their mutual relations. In these may be tracetl 

 the germ of his ideas on geograpliic distribution. The 

 intensity of Heer's method of field study has corrobo- 

 ration in the University collection of insects, one of the 

 scientific sights of Europe. It contains no fewer than 

 30,000 species of the Coleoptera alone, and took Heer seven 

 years to collect and arrange. He also about this time 

 issued memoirs, mainly on the transformations or distribu- 

 tion of the Swiss Coleoptera, as well as the distribution of 

 Alpine plants. 



