GEORGE ENGELMANN. 1 



In the death of Dr. Engelmann, which took place on the 

 4th of February last, the American Academy has lost one of 

 its very few Associate Fellows in the Botanical Section, and 

 the science one of its most eminent and venerable cultivators. 



He was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, February 2, 1809, 

 and had therefore just completed his seventy-fifth year. His 

 father, a younger member of the family of Engelmanns who 

 for several generations served as clergymen at Bacharach on 

 the Rhine, was also educated for the ministry, and was a 

 graduate of the university of Halle, but he devoted his life to 

 education. Marrying the daughter of George Oswald May, a 

 somewhat distinguished portrait-painter, they established at 

 Frankfort, and carried on for a time with much success, a 

 school for young ladies, such as are common in the United 

 States, but were then a novelty in Germany. 



George Engelmann was the eldest of thirteen children 

 born of this marriage, nine of whom survived to manhood. 

 Assisted by a scholarship founded by " the Reformed Congre- 

 gation of Frankfort," he went to the university of Heidelberg 

 in the year 1827, where he had as fellow -students and com- 

 panions Karl Schimper and Alexander Braun. With the 

 latter he maintained an intimate friendship and correspond- 

 ence, interrupted only by the death of Braun in 1877. The 

 former, who manifested unusual genius as a philosophical 

 naturalist, after laying the foundations of phyllotaxy, to be 

 built upon by Braun and others, abandoned, through some 

 singular infirmity of temper, an opening scientific career of 

 the highest promise, upon which the three young friends, 

 Agassiz, Braun, and Schimper, and in his turn Engelmann, 

 had zealously entered. 



i Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Science, xix. 516. 

 (1884.) 



