Nathanael Pringsheim

Nathanael Pringsheim is a German Botaniste , born the November 30th 1823 in an Jewish family of Landsberg in Silesia (at the time Prussian; currently Gorzów Śląski in Poland) and dead the October 6th 1894 with Berlin. His/her father was commercial easy. His/her Margarethe daughter married the chemist Albert Ladenburg (1842-1911) of Mannheim.

It makes its studies at the Universities of Breslau, Leipzig and Berlin. It obtains in 1848 a title of doctor of philosophy with a thesis entitled Of formed and incremento stratorum crassiorum in plantarum cellula , and it is distinguished quickly among those which riigent the great rebirth of botany at the 19th century.

With the French scientists Gustave Adolphe Thuret (1817-1875) and Jean-Baptiste Edouard Bornet (1828-1911), Pringsheim belongs to the founders of the modern Algologie. It makes research on the Vaucheria (1855), the Oedogoniaceae (1855 - 1858), the Coleochaeteae (1860), the kinds Hydrodictyon (1861) and Pandorina (1869). Its last report, Beobachtungen uber die Paarung der Zoosporen , revêt a considerable importance with the conjugation of the Zoospore S that Pringsheim regards as a primitive form of sexual reproduction.

Its work on the morphological differentiation of the Sphacelariaceae (1873), one of marine alga, milked evolution with a point of view closer to Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817-1891) that of Darwin (1809-1882). Its research on the Saprolegniaceae, a family of Mushroom S algoïdes responsible for diseases at the Poisson S, is worth a certain notoriety to him.

Among its work on the higher plants, it is necessary to quote its important monograph on a curious kind of Fougère S navy, Savinia . Its career of morphologist culminates in 1876 when it makes appear a report on the alternation of the generations at Thallophyte S and the foams. Starting from 1874 and until the end of its life, Pringsheim is devoted mainly to relative questions with physiology. It publishes long series of memories on the assimilation of the Carbone by the plants, the central point of its theory being which it regarded the pigment of the Chlorophylle as a screen playing a mainly protective part for the Protoplasme against the light which, by stimulating too actively breathing, would neutralize its assimilatrice activity. But this point of view was not retained to explain this phenomenon.

Pringsheim founds in 1858 the review Jahrbuch für wissenschaftliche Botanik , which it directs until its death. It takes part in the foundation in 1882 of the German botanical Société (Botanische Gesellschaft). Its work proceeds within the framework of its private laboratory of Berlin except for one four years short period, of 1864 with 1868, where he teaches at the university of Iéna. At end of its life, he plays a political role in his country, the liberal rows.

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