OSWALD HEER. 1 



Oswald Heer, the most eminent investigator of the fossil 

 plants and insects of the tertiary period, died on the 27th of 

 September last, shortly after he had entered upon the seventy- 

 fifth year of his age. 



He was born at the hamlet of Nieder-Utzwyl, in Canton 

 St. Gallen, Switzerland, August 31, 1809, passed most of 

 his youth at Matt, in Canton Glarus, where his father was 

 the parish clergyman, pursued his academic and professional 

 studies at the university of Halle, and was ordained as min- 

 ister of the Gospel in the year 1831. The next year he went 

 to Zurich, where he resided for the rest of his life. Here he 

 studied medicine for a time, but soon devoted himself seri- 

 ously to entomology and botany, of which he was fond from 

 boyhood. In 1834 he became Privat-docent of these sciences ; 

 in 1852, when the university of Zurich was developed, he be- 

 came its professor of botany, and in 1855 he took a similar 

 chair in the Polytechnicum. Most of his earlier publications 

 were entomological ; and it was by the way of entomology that 

 he entered upon his distinguished career as a palaeontologist. 

 His life-long friend, the eminent Escher von der Linth, ap- 

 preciating his rare powers of observation, induced him to 

 undertake the study of the fossil insects of the celebrated ter- 

 tiary deposits of Oeningen. The results of his labors in this 

 virgin field were published between the years 1847 and 1853. 

 His attention had from the first been attracted to the plants 

 associated with the insect remains. His first palseo-botanical 

 paper appeared in 1851 ; the three volumes of his " Flora 

 Tertiaria Helvetian " were issued between 1855 and 1859 ; in 

 1862 his memoir on the fossil flora of Bovey-Tracey (Eng- 



1 Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science, xix. 556. 

 (1884.) 



