Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/273

Rh species, as well as with many other plants, of which perhaps only the annals of botany may take account."

was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, February 2, 1809, and died in St. Louis, Missouri, February 4, 1884. He came of a family of clergymen who had been settled for several generations as pastors at Bacharach on the Rhine, and was the eldest of thirteen children. His father was director of a school for girls at Frankfort. He went through the usual course of gymnasia! instruction in that city, and there acquired his taste for scientific studies, which was stimulated under the inspiration given by the Leuckenberg Philosophical Society, a body to which the journey of Rupell, one of its members, in Nubia, Kordofan, Arabia Petræa, and Abyssinia, had given considerable renown. In the spring of 1827, when he was eighteen years old, he entered the University of Heidelberg, where he met as fellow-students Alexander Braun, who afterward became an eminent botanist, and Carl Schimper, whose name is associated with the early history of phyllotaxy. A close fellowship, which lasted through Braun's life, sprang up between him and Braun, and they were accustomed, at their evening meetings, to discuss questions of the physiology and morphology of plants. Here he also met and made friends with Agassiz, who afterward became a brother-in-law of Braun's. In 1828 he removed, in consequence of a political incident at Heidelberg, to the University of Berlin, whence, after two years of residence there, he went to Würzburg, and there took the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1831. His graduating thesis, "De Antholysi Prodromus" a morphological dissertation on the study of monstrosities, illustrated with his own drawings, was an important contribution to teratology, and has held a prominent place in the literature of morphology. Having been brought under the notice of Goethe, who had forty years before published an essay on the morphology of plants, only four weeks before his death, that great author testified his appreciation of the mastery which the young botanist had attained of the subject by offering to present to him the unpublished notes and sketches which he had accumulated. Engelmann's original manuscript of the thesis, with his drawings, is now preserved in the library of the Herbarium of Harvard University.

This pamphlet, written in Latin, and that not the most classic, has been compared, in "Nature," by Mr. Maxwell F. Masters, with the more elaborate "Élémens de Tératologic Végétale" of Moquin-Tandon, written nearly ten years later, or in 1841. Moquin's work, says Mr. Masters, "is written in a style which even a foreigner can read with pleasure. Its method, too, is clear and symmetrical; but when we compare the two works from a philosophical point of view, and consider that the one was a mere college essay, while the other was the work of a professed botanist, we must admit that Engelmann's treatise, so far as it goes, affords evidence of a deeper insight into the nature