BRIEFER ARTICLES 
WILHELM PFEFFER 
(WITH PORTRAIT) 
WILHELM PFEFFER was born March 9, 1845, the son of a pharmacist, 
and died January 31, 1920. He studied at Géttingen, Marburg, Berlin, 
and Wiirzburg, taking his doctor’s degree at Géttingen in 1865. He 
held university positions in Marburg, Bonn, Basel, and Tiibingen before 
going to Leipzig in 1887, 
where he spent the rest of 
his life. It was here that 
he developed a laboratory 
and garden exactly accord- 
ing to his ideas, and this 
equipment probably held 
him at Leipzig in spite of 
calls elsewhere. PFEFFER 
probably shares with 
STRASBURGER the distinc- 
tion of having more 
foreign students in his 
laboratory than any other 
German professor. His 
contribution to plant phys- 
iology, therefore, included 
not only his own re- 
searches, but also the 
stimulus of his ideas and 
ductive students. He had 
what may be called an 
unusual perspective in 
connection with problems, seeing the various directions of attack, and 
the relations of results to the general field. 
is publications, 96 in number, began with an ecological paper on 
mosses and some embryological papers, but soon passed into plant 
physiology. The sequence from the decomposition of carbon dioxide 
Botanical Gazette, vol. 71] [152 
