Grisebach, August Heinrich Rudolf

(b. Hannover, Germany, 17 April 1814; d. Göttingen, Germany, 9 May 1879)

botany, taxonomy.

Grisebach was the son of the auditor general Rudolph Grisebach and Louise Meyer, his second wife. His uncle Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer was a well-known botanist and the first to instruct the young Grisebach in botany. As a boy Grisebach began to collect plants and acquired a good knowledge of the native flora. He studied medicine and natural history at Göttingen (1832-1834) and at Berlin (1834-1836) and was Privatdozent at Berlin and, from 1837, at Göttingen. In l839-1840 he traveled through the Balkan peninsula and northwestern Asia Minor. This most important journey of his life led him through regions that were for the greater part botanically unexplored. The two books he published about this journey established his reputation as a botanical taxonomist and phytogeographer. While a student he had explored the western Alps (1833), and later he traveled to Norway (1842), southern France and the Pyrenees (1850), and the Carpathian Mountains (1852). In 1841 he became associate professor, and in 1847 full professor, at the University of Göttingen. He declined various offers of professorships elsewhere.

His scientific career is marked by the close connection of traditional taxonomic investigations and phytogeographic studies. In taxonomy and floristic botany he began his work with a monograph on the genus Gentiana. He specialized in Malpighiaceae, Gramineae, and the genus Hieracium, and studied the flora of southeastern Europe, Central America and Argentina. His works on the flora of these regions are still well known and used, although of course outdated in detail. Flora of the British West Indian Islands has recently been reprinted, and there is a detailed commentary by Stearn.

Grisebach was far ahead of his time in proposing a work, “Flora Europaea,” of which only a fragment appeared after his death. Grisebach was not one of the great taxonomists of the time. He was perhaps not primarily interested in the problems of systematics but rather in floristic botany as one of the cornerstones of the great structure of synthetic phytogeography that he envisioned.

In phytogeography, for which he coined the modern term “geobotany” (Geobotanik) in 1866, Grisebach was especially influenced by the ideas of Alexander von Humboldt about the effect of climate on the composition of flora, particularly on the socalled physiognomic plant types. Grisebach’s main work, Die Vegetation der Erde nach ihrer klimatischen Anordnung (1872), drew on his floristic studies, various travels in Europe, his great herbarium, and an intensive study of the contemporary literature. The extent of his reading is apparent in his Berichte über die Leistungen in der Pfltmzengeographie (1841-1853 and 1868-1876) forerunners of modern “progress reports.” His herbarium was of use in such tasks as the calculation of the numbers of endemic species in different parts of the Mediterranean. In the Vegetation der Erde Grisebach gave a lively picture of the earth’s plants emphasizing the effect of climate on the composition and distribution of the flora. It has been noted that he had an amazing ability to describe the vegetation of countries that he himself had never seen. Grisebach extended the system of physiognomic plant types (Vegetationsformen) founded by Humboldt to comprise fifty-four forms, an idea revived and refined in recent times. The limitations of his work are to be found in his relative disregard of historical factors and the imperfect knowledge of the physiological foundations of ecology of his time. Nevertheless, this book has been of great importance as one of the first comprehensive reviews of knowledge of the earth’s vegetation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete bibliography of Grisebach’s writings compiled by his son Eduard appeared in Grisebach’s posthumous Gesammelte Abhandlungen und kleinere Schriften zur Pltanzengeographie (Leipzig, 1880) and was reprinted by Stearn, in Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University, 46 (1965), 250. A short bibliography can be found in the necrology by Reinke (see below).

His most important works are Genera et species Gentianearum (Stuttgart-Tübingen, 1838); Reise durch Rumelien und nach Brussa im Jahre 1839, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 184l); Spicilegium florae Rumelicae et Bithynicae, 2 vols. (Brunswick, 1843–l844); Flora of the British West Indian Islands (London, 1859-1864; repr 1963); Catalogus plantarum Cubensium (Leipzig, (866); Die Vegetation der Erde nach ihrer klimatischen Anordnung, 2 vols. (Leipzig., 1872; 2nd ed., 1884-1885); Plantae Lorentzianae (Göttingen, 1874); and Symbolae ad Floram argentinam (Göttingen, 1879).

II. Secondary Literature. The most detailed biographical notes have been published by J. Reinke in Botanische Zeitung, 37 (1879), 521-534. This is supplemented (especially as concerns his family) by E. Grisebach, Geschichte der Familie Grisebach (Hamburg, 1936). The article by O. Drude, in A. Petermanns Mitteilungen aus J. Perthes Geographischer Anstalt, 25 (1879), 269–271, emphasizes the importance of his works for phytogeography. There are short biographies by E. Wunschmann, in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, XLIX (Leipzig, 1904), and by H. Dolezal, in Neue deutsche Biographie, VII (Berlin, 1966), with an extensive bibliography of secondary literature.

Gerhard Wagenitz