JOHANNES AUGUST CHRISTIAN RCEPER. 1 



Johannes August Christian Rceper died on the 17th 

 of March, 1884, at the age of eighty-four. He had been for 

 some time the oldest botanist we know of, at least the oldest 

 botanical author ; for his first work, a monograph of the Ger- 

 man species of Euphorbia, was published in 1824. He was 

 director of the Botanic Garden at Basle in 1828, when he 

 published his classical paper " De Organis Plantarum," and 

 he may have been so in 1826, when he contributed to Seringe's 

 44 Melanges Botaniques " his paper on the nature of flowers and 

 inflorescences, which first put the latter upon a scientific basis 

 and essentially established the present nomenclature. He was 

 botanical professor there in 1830, when he published his tract 

 44 De Floribus et Afnnitatibus Balsaminearum." In these es- 

 says he gave the promise of being one of the foremost morpho- 

 logical botanists of the age. Some time before the year 1840 

 he was translated to Rostock, where he held the botanical pro- 

 fessorship for more than forty years, but without fulfilling the 

 promise of his youth by additional contributions to the science 

 of any considerable importance. There are, however, some 

 articles from him in the 44 Botanische Zeitung," and other Ger- 

 man periodicals, the latest in the year 1859. In 1851 he was 

 chosen a Foreign Member of the Linnsean Society of London. 

 We find no record of the time or place of his nativity, but we 

 infer from a statement in the preface of his work on Euphorbia, 

 which was published at Gottingen, that he was a German and 

 not a Swiss. He is said to have been most amiable, and of 

 deep religious convictions. 



1 American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., xxxi. 22. (1886.) 



