Julius von Sachs

See also: Sachs

Julius von Sachs is a German Botaniste , born the October 2nd 1832 with Breslau and dead the May 29th 1897.

It shows very young person an interest for the Natural history. It leaves the school in 1851 and becomes the assistant of the physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787-1869) with Prague. In 1856, it obtains a title of doctor in Philosophie and is directed then towards a career in Botanique. It is established like Privatdozent in vegetable physiology at the university of Prague.

In 1859, it obtains a station of assistant to the agricultural Academy of Tharandt in Saxony; in 1861, it obtains the direction of the polytechnic school of Chemnitz, but is almost immediately transferred to the agricultural Academy from Poppelsdorf, close to Bonn, station which it occupies until in 1867. It is then named professor of botany at the university of Freiburg-in-Brisgau. In 1868, it accepts the pulpit of botany of the Université of Würzburg, which it will occupy until its death in spite of the repeated offers of the other German universities.

The talents of Sachs as researcher, author and teacher are worth a great fame to him. Its name is particularly associated with the development with vegetable physiology with second half of the 19th century, which becomes an important branch of botany. Its last articles, dispersed in many newspapers of botany or learned societies, show the extent of its centers of interest.

It is thus necessary to quote the series entitled Keimungsgeschichten , which marks the microchemical birth of the methods of analysis, devoted to the study of the physiology and the morphology of the process of Germination.

He also works on the problems of nutrition and shows that the starch grains that he finds in the chloroplastides constitute the first nutritive element of seed.

Its last articles all were almost published in the review Arbeiten of botanisthen Instituts in Würzburg (1871-1788). Among those, it should be announced that where it shows the influence of the spectrum on the speed of growth of the plants or that where he presents the Héliotropisme and the Géotropisme, among good of others.

Its Handbuch der Experimentalphysiologie of Pflanzen (1865; translated into French as of 1868) given a progress report on knowledge of the time and has a considerable audience. It is followed, in 1868, by the first edition of its famous Lehrbuch der Botanik , one of the best handbooks of botany of the XIXe century. He knows many republications, as well in Germany as in other European countries .

Its work, Vorlesungen uber Pflanzenphysiologie (1882, republished in 1887) is specialized more. He is also the author of a history of botany, Geschichte der Botanik which appears in 1875 and which will be also translated in the principal European languages. Julius von Sachs became foreign member of Royal Society the May 31st 1888.

Its teaching has a great influence on its students. Among those, it is necessary to quote: Julius Oscar Brefeld (1839-1925), Wilhelm Friedrich Philipp Pfeffer (1845-1920), Francis Darwin (1848-1925), Christian Ernest Stahl (1848-1919), Hugo de Vries (1848-1935), Karl Anton Eugen Prantl (1849-1893), Karl Ritter von Goebel (1855-1932), Georg Albrecht Klebs (1857-1913), Hermann Müller Thurgau (1850-1927) and Fritz Noll (1858-1908).

List partial of the publications

1859 : Physiologische Untersuchungen über die Keimung der Schmikbohne (Phaseolus multiflorus)
1859: Ueber das abwechselnde Erbleichen und Dunkelwerden der Blätter EIB wechselnder Beleuchtung
1862: Ueber das Vergeilen der Pflanzen
1863: Ueber den Einfluss of Tageslichtes auf die Neublidung unt Entfaltung verschiedener Pflanzenorgane
1865: Handbuch der Experimentalphysiologie der Pflanzen
1868: Lehrbuch der Botanik
1871 - 1872: Die Geschichte der Botanik vom 16. Jahrhundert (a) 1860
1882: Die Vorlesungen über "Pflanzenphysiologie
1892 : Gesammelte Abhandlungen über Pflanzenphysiologie
1894 : Mechanomorphosen und Phylogeny
1896: Phylogenetische Aphorismen und ueber innere Gestaltungsursachen oder Automorphosen

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