﻿BRIEFER ARTICLES 



COUNT SOLMS-LAUBACH 1 

 (with portrait) 



By the death of Hermann, Graf zu Solms-Laubach, on November 

 24, 1915, Germany has lost the most distinguished of her botanists 

 and the world of science one of its most impressive figures. Count 

 Solms was born on Decem- 

 ber 23, 1842, and had thus 

 nearly completed his seventy- 

 third year. He came of one of 

 the most ancient of German 

 families, who were sovereign in 

 their own domains down to the 

 year 1806. He himself devoted 

 his life wholly to science, hold- 

 ing the professorship of botany 

 first at Gottingen and afterward 

 at Strassburg. He resigned the 

 latter post a few years ago, but 

 continued to live in the town, 

 surrounded by his university 



His work extended to every 

 department of botany. Begin- 

 ning with an important series of 

 researches on parasitic phanero- 

 gams, he subsequently monographed several natural orders, including the 

 screw pines. His interest in the morphology of flowering plants continued 

 in later years; in 1900 he described the remarkable crucifer Capsella 

 Hegeri, with indehiscent fruits, regarding it as a mutant of the common 

 C. Bursa-pastoris. He was always interested in variation, and carried 

 out important investigations on the history of cultivated plants, such 

 as the fig, the pawpaw, wheat, tulips, and strawberries. In embryology 



[Botanical Gazette, 



