HUGO VON MOHL. 1 



Hugo von Mohl, the acknowledged chief of the vegetable 

 anatomists of this generation, died on the first day of April 

 last. He was born at Stuttgart, April 8, 1805, the youngest 

 of four brothers who all became men of mark in political and 

 scientific life ; Julius the orientalist and Hugo the botanist 

 being the most distinguished. The latter was educated at the 

 Stuttgart Gymnasium and Tubingen University, where he 

 studied medicine as well as natural history and physics. His 

 first publication, while a student, in the year 1827, was his 

 " Essay on the Structure and Coiling of Tendrils and Twi- 

 ners," written in response to a prize-question offered by the 

 Tubingen Medical Faculty. In it he divined the real nature 

 of the movements which coiling stems and tendrils execute, as 

 has recently been clearly made out. In the following year 

 appeared his inaugural dissertation on the " Pores of the Cel- 

 lular Tissue of Plants," in which his later views and discoveries, 

 respecting the structure, growth, and component parts of cells, 

 as subsequently developed, are already foreshadowed. About 

 this time his choice was made for a scientific rather than a 

 medical career ; and he went to Munich to prosecute more 

 advantageously his favorite studies. Here the late Von Mar- 

 tius and Zuccarni were his botanical masters, and Agassiz, 

 Karl Schimper, Braun, and Engelmann his fellow-students. 

 Here he made those researches upon the anatomy of Ferns, 

 Cycads, and especially of Palms, — the latter a most important 

 contribution to Martius's great work upon Palms, the former 

 also contributed to another work by Martius, — which first 

 displayed his remarkable talents for histological investigation, 

 to which his subsequent scientific life was mainly devoted. 

 His merits were promptly recognized by a call to the Imperial 

 1 American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., v. 393. (1873.) 



