Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/567

Rh was appointed a teacher of physics, botany, and mineralogy, in the High-School of Zürich. In October, 1835, he was appointed Professor Extraordinary of Botany and Entomology, in the same school, and his position and career were fixed for life. He became Professor of Botany in the university when it was founded, in 1852, and in the Polytechnicum in 1855. He founded the Botanic Garden of Zürich, and became its director, and became President of the Society of Agriculture and Horticulture in 1845. For twenty years he was a Rathsherr, or member of the Grand Council of the city. He was elected to the American Academy of Sciences in 1877.

The general character and value of Professor Heer's scientific work are expressed in the commendations passed upon it by the Marquis de Saporta and others, extracts from which are given at the beginning of the present sketch. His scientific publications, according to the list given in the "Botanisches Centralblatt" in 1884, are seventy-seven in number, besides the seven quarto volumes of the "Flora Fossilis Arctica," which comprise a considerable number of independent memoirs. They are in the departments of entomology, botany, and palæo-botany. Following shortly after his first published paper, already mentioned as communicated to the Physical Society of Zürich, were two memoirs published in his geographical magazine, on the geographical distribution of insects and plants in the Swiss Alps, the former paper of which was afterward expanded into a memoir on the Swiss Coleoptera. From this time on his labors were continuous; as M. de Saporta remarks, they touch and are interlinked, and nothing interrupts them. Beginning with the study of insects, as we have seen, he was led naturally to regard flowers, the habitual haunts of insects, and thence to the examination of the fossil insects and plants of Œningen, whence his labors expanded to embrace the fossil flora of the world. His attention was first directed to the tertiary beds of Œningen, by his friend Escher von der Linth. These beds are situated not far from Zürich, on the right bank of the Rhine, near where it issues from the Lake of Constance, and include in a series of thin sheets, like leaves of paper, innumerable impressions of insects and plants. Scheuchzer had found there, nearly a hundred years before, a skeleton which he took to be of one of the victims of the flood, but which Cuvier determined to be a salamander, and later naturalists to be a congener of species now existing in the fresh waters of Japan and in the American lakes. More than six hundred species of plants and a thousand insects have been found in these beds and described by Heer, the chief results of whose labors upon them were published between 1847 and 1853. He devoted three large works to accounts of the ancient flora and the geological past of Switzerland. The first was the "Flora Tertiaria Helvetiæ," which appeared 1855-1859, in three volumes, with one hundred and fifty-six plates; next was the "Urwelt der Schweitz," in 1865, which was translated into six