OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



Karl Ernst von Baer, one of the ten children of Magnus von Baer, 

 was born at the family estate of Piep, in Esthonia, on the 28th of 

 February, 1792. The first seven years of his life were spent in the 

 house of his childless uncle, Karl von Baer, who seems to have had a 

 wholesome dread of premature teaching, for when the young nephew 

 returned in his eighth year to his father's house in order to be educated 

 with his sisters, he did not so much as know his letters, though he had 

 so far grown in mind as to be heartily ashamed of his backwardness. 

 He speedily, however, made up for lost time, and in 1807 was entered 

 at the High School of Reval, which he left in 1810 to join the Uni- 

 versity of Dorpat. Already drawn towards natural history, and 

 especially towards botany, he became a student of medicine, and on 

 the 29th of August, 1814, took his degree of doctor. The medical 

 teaching at Dorpat was at that time far from satisfactory ; from none 

 of his masters save from Burdach, the physiologist, can Baer be said 

 to have learnt anything, and when he became doctor he felt that his 

 medical training had yet to begin. He accordingly moved to Vienna ; 

 but the more he tried to throw himself into purely medical studies, the 

 more he felt that fate had not destined him for an active professional 

 life. In the spring of 1815, happening to make with a friend a visit 

 to the neighbouring Schneeberg, the Alpine flora he there found so 

 powerfully revived his repressed love of botanical studies, that he 

 determined at all risks to devote himself as far as possible to science. 

 An accidental interview with von Martius determined him to place 

 himself in the same summer under Dollinger, at Wurzburg, and the 

 merit of having made von Baer an anatomist must be reckoned to the 

 credit of that worthy teacher. Thither also came Baer's friend and 

 countryman, Pander, to begin under Dollinger those studies on the 

 development of the chick in which Baer was destined afterwards to 

 take so great a part. At Wurzburg, however, Baer showed nothing 

 more than a friendly interest in these investigations, and when in 1817 

 he moved to Konigsberg to become prosector to Burdach, who had in 

 1814 been transferred thither from Dorpat, he threw himself with 

 zeal into the ordinary anatomical and zoological studies. He had 

 spent the previous winter in Berlin in order to fit himself more fully 

 for his new post. His activity soon made itself felt ; besides his purely 

 anatomical lectures and demonstrations he found time to deliver an 

 anthropological course, thus early indicating the tendencies to which 

 lie gave up so many of his later years, and in 1819 to establish a new 



vol. xxvii. a 



