292 
THE PLANT WORLD. 
After his attendance at the realschule he addressed himself to the 
calling of a publisher and later entered the business of his father. 
At the same time he busied himself with botany. That Schleiden’s 
“ Elements of the Science of Botany/’ which appeared in the year 
1842, with its suggestive though often crude and not^ seldom un¬ 
just criticism of the older trend of botanical thought, and with 
its stimulating indication of the significance of the developmental 
method, influenced him we already know from the other great 
botanists whose youth was of the same period; thus Sachs has 
said that Schleiden’s book, though it contained many errors, was 
as the ruddy dawn of a new day to come. Entirely self-taught, 
Hofmeister started, at about the middle of the last century when 
but nineteen years old, upon a series of highly significant studies, 
studies which placed him at once in the first rank of botanists. 
To these I shall refer below. Although his results were to some 
extent called into question, Hofmeister’s works gained for him 
recognition from the best of his contemporaries. In 1851 he was 
adorned with the Doctor’s degree, honoris causa , by the Univer¬ 
sity of Rostock—one of the smallest of German universities to be 
sure—and was thus initiated in a sort of way into the academic 
guild. In the year 1863 he was called to the Ordinary Professor¬ 
ship of Botany and the Directorship of the Botanical Garden of 
the University of Heidelberg. That a man in private life, though 
learned, who was not a Docent in the University, should be made 
Ordinary Professor is an unheard of thing in Germany, aside 
from the Faculties of Medicine. Moreover, Hofmeister’s call 
came not on the nomination of the Faculty, but directly from the 
Ministry who quite rightly represented him “ as one of the first 
botanists of Germany, as a man of distinguished gifts, of great 
energy and application and of remarkable powers of presenta¬ 
tion.”* We are under the greater obligations to the Ministry for 
this act, since as a result not only was Hofmeister’s scientific 
activity greatly increased—the writing of his general morphology 
would scarcely have been possible had he not been able to give his 
* See “ Wilhelm Hofmeister,” by E. Pfitzer, in “ Heidelberger Profess- 
oren aus dem 19 Jahrhunderts.” Festschrift der Universitat zur Centenar- 
feier — Erneuerung durch Karl Friedrich. 2 Bd., 1903. 
