Christiaan Hendrik Persoon
Template:Short description Script error: No such module "redirect hatnote". Template:Use dmy dates Script error: No such module "Template wrapper".Script error: No such module "Check for clobbered parameters".
Christiaan Hendrik Persoon (31 December 1761[1] – 16 November 1836) was a Cape Colony mycologist who is recognized as one of the founders of mycological taxonomy.
Early life
Persoon was born in Cape Colony at the Cape of Good Hope, the third child of an immigrant Pomeranian father, Christiaan Daniel Persoon, and Dutch mother, Wilhelmina Elizabeth Groenwald.[1] His mother died soon after he was born. In 1775, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to Europe for his education. His father died a year later in 1776.[2]
Education
Initially a student of theology at Halle, Persoon switched his studies to medicine, which he pursued in Leiden and then Göttingen. He received a doctorate from the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher in Erlangen 1799.[3]
Later years
He moved to Paris by 1803, where he spent the rest of his life, renting the upper floor of a house in a poor part of town. He was apparently unemployed, unmarried, poverty-stricken and a recluse, although he corresponded with botanists throughout Europe. Because of his financial difficulties, Persoon agreed to donate his herbarium to the House of Orange, in return for an adequate pension for life.[4]
Academic career
The origin of Persoon's botanical interest is unknown. The earliest of his works was Abbildungen der Schwämme (Illustrations of the fungi), published in three parts, in 1790, 1791, and 1793. In 1794, Persoon introduced the term Template:Lichengloss for the furrowed ascomata of the lichen genus Graphis.[5] From 1805 to 1807, he published two volumes of his Synopsis plantarum (Template:Webarchive), a popular work describing 20,000 species of all types of plants. But his pioneering work was in the fungi, for which he published several works, beginning with the Synopsis methodica fungorum (1801); it is the starting point for nomenclature of the Uredinales, Ustilaginales, and the Gasteromycetes. Persoon described many polypore species; most were from his own collections in central Europe, while several other tropical species were sent to him from collections made by French botanist Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré during his circumglobal expedition. These latter fungi are among the first tropical polypores ever described.[6] In 1815, Persoon was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Persoon was a prolific author of new fungal species, having formally described 2269 in his career.[7]
Recognition
The genus Persoonia, a variety of small Australian trees and shrubs, was named after him. The title Persoonia is also given to a biannual scientific journal of molecular phylogeny and evolution of fungi, published jointly by the National Herbarium of the Netherlands and the CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre.[8]
<templatestyles src="Botanist/styles.css"/>
See also
References
- Duane Isely, One hundred and one botanists (Iowa State University Press, 1994), pp. 124–126.
<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />
- ↑ a b Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ de Zeeuw, R. (1939). Notes on the life of Persoon. Mycologia 31(3): 369-70.
- ↑ Petersen R.H. (1977). Some brief reflections on C.H. Persoon. Kew Bulletin 31(3):695-98.
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
- ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".
External links
Template:Sister project Template:Wikisource/outer coreScript error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters". Template:Sister project
- Pages with script errors
- German taxonomists
- 1761 births
- 1836 deaths
- Mycologists
- Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
- Cape Colony botanists
- 18th-century German botanists
- 19th-century German botanists
- 18th-century German writers
- 18th-century German male writers
- 19th-century German writers
- 19th-century German male writers
- Members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
- German mycologists