BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
xix 
REPaINTED FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND ScrENcEs, VoL. XX. pp. 516-522. 
In the death of Dr. Engelmann, which took place on the 4th of February, 1884, the American 
Academy 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, Feb. 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 distin- 
guished 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 Congregation 
of Frankfort,” he went to the University of Heidelberg in the year 1827, where he had as fellow- 
students and companions Karl Schimper and Alexander Braun. With the latter he maintained 
an intimate friendship and correspondence, 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, — and Schimper, and in his turn Engelmann, had zealously entered. 
rrassed by some troubles growing out of a political demonstration by the students at 
Heidelbers, Engelmann in the autumn of 1828 went to Berlin University for two years, and thence 
to Wiirzburg, where he took his degree of Doctor in Medicine in the summer of 1831. His in- 
augural dissertation, De Antholysi Prodromus, which he published at Frankfort in 1832, testifies 
to his early predilection for Botany, and to his truly scientific turn of mind. It is a morphological 
dissertation, founded chiefly on the study of monstrosities, illustrated by five plates filled with his 
own drawings. It was therefore quite in the line with the little treatise on the “ Metamorphosis 
of Plants,” published forty years before by another and the most distinguished native of Frankfort ; 
and it appeared so opportunely that it had the honor of Goethe’s notice and approval. Goethe's 
correspondent, Madame von Willema, sent a copy to him only four weeks before his death. Goethe 
' responded, making kind inquiries after young Engelmann, who, he said, had completely apprehended 
his ideas of vegetable morphology, and had shown such genius in their development that he offered 
to ates in this young botanist’s hands the store of unpublished notes and sketches which he had 
accum 
The siti and summer of 1832 were passed at Paris in medical and scientific studies, with 
Braun and Agassiz as companions, leading, as he records, “a glorious life in scientific union, in spite 
