Julius von Sachs
Julius Sachs ( born October 2, 1832 in Breslau, † May 29, 1897 in Würzburg ) was a German botanist. He is regarded as the founder of experimental plant physiology. Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Sachs ".
Life
Sachs was born as the seventh child of an engraver in a Jewish family. He grew up in very modest circumstances, the parents it was not possible to train her son according to his genius investments. At least it was possible for him to visit the school.
First suggestions for the natural sciences received Sachs already as a teenager by the Breslau physiologist and pathologist January Evangelista Purkinje, whose sons went to school with him. Through contact with them, he found, to his sense of the beauty of nature. Early on he collected and certain plants with great enthusiasm. After he had lost at the age of 17 years, father, mother and brother, he initially decided to leave the school and to become a sailor. From this decision could stop him Purkinje by taking him in 1850 when he moved from Wroclaw to Prague as a private assistant.
There sat Sachs continued his studies and graduated in 1851 at the University of Prague natural sciences. In addition, he worked for Purkinje and a doctorate in 1856, Dr. phil. He habilitated in 1857 for the subject of botany.
In his early work, Sachs deal with topics related to nutrition and growth physiology. In 1859, he received the recommendation of the zoologist Friedrich Ritter von Stein ( 1818-1885 ) and the botanist Friedrich Wilhelm Hofmeister, then still a music dealer in Leipzig, a position as an assistant at agrikulturtechnischen laboratory in Tharandt. Here he was able to further develop the methods of culture of plants in the laboratory and to attract (simultaneously with Wilhelm Knop ) plants in inorganic nutrient solutions.
Sachs did research especially in the field of plant physiology. The authorities in this area were in his time especially Hugo von Mohl, Carl Wilhelm von Naegeli and Friedrich Wilhelm Hofmeister. These were primarily concerned with studies of plant cell and tissue. Sachs busy with his experimental physiology previous approaches by Stephen Hales, Thomas Andrew Knight, Nicolas Théodore de Saussure or Jean Baptiste Boussingault.
He developed the so-called Auxanometer, a device for the measurement of plant growth.
1863 Sachs, Professor of Botany at the agricultural establishment to Poppelsdorf in Bonn. During the six years that he worked there, he was able, among other evidence that strength that is formed by the assimilation of carbon dioxide in the chlorophyll grains, disappears in the dark and in the light's new again. This evidence they provided with the known iodine sample.
During this period also showed that Sachs was an outstanding botanical writer. On 1 October 1865 he published the "Handbook of Experimental Physiology ," in the clear presentation an overview of interesting and important experiments in plant physiology contained. This allowed Sachs to publicize this subject to a wider audience.
In 1867 he was the successor of Heinrich Anton de Bary at the Albert- Ludwigs- University in Freiburg im Breisgau. There it held him but because of these poor working conditions less than a year. In 1868 he was appointed professor at the University of Würzburg, where he worked for over 30 years, despite numerous calls to other universities (including to Jena, Heidelberg, Vienna, Berlin, Bonn and Munich). In 1874 he became a corresponding, in 1880 foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
Sachs explored, among others, the branching of roots that led him to Keimungsphysiologie. He has contributed essential to clarify the photosynthetic processes, closing at developmental physiological studies on the presence of " flower -forming substances", a hypothesis that has been taken up and confirmed until half a century later.
In addition to his many other works in the field of plant physiology (for example, the stimulus physiology ) Sachs has become interested and engaged in other fields of botany and biology. He took, for example, to position phylogeny of plants, and for Dezendenztheorie of Charles Darwin, whose selection principle he held, however, for an insufficient explanation for evolution.
Remarkable for its position to protect species: he has spoken at the end of the 19th century with the following sentences on the subject: " To me it has always seemed strange that even naturalists view the extermination of typical shapes with cool air with; when you consider that each organic form of their phylogenetic origin after a historical event that can never be repeated, so is their extermination by a gap for all eternity in the organic world causes, and that is surely no small thing, even if it is not about giant birds, but only microscopic species ".
Many students of Sachs were later famous botanist, including Julius Oscar Brefeld, Francis Darwin (1848-1925), Karl Ritter von Goebel, Georg Albrecht Klebs, Spiridon Miliarakis, Hermann Müller -Thurgau, Gregor Kraus, Fritz Noll (1858-1908), Wilhelm Pfeffer, Karl Prantl, Ernst Stahl and Hugo de Vries.
Works (selection)
Awards
On May 31, 1888 Sachs was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.