Karl Heinrich Mertens

Karl Heinrich Mertens, often only Heinrich Mertens, ( born May 7, 1796 in Bremen, † September 29, 1830 in Kronstadt (Russia) ) was a German physician and botanist. Its official botanical author abbreviation is K.Mert.

Biography

Karl Heinrich Mertens was the son of Franz Karl Mertens, a German botanist. He also studied botany. 1813 and 1815, he voluntarily took part in the campaigns against Napoleon while getting to know several French botanist. He also spent some time in England and then studied medicine in Göttingen and natural sciences. From 1821 he worked as a doctor in Bremen, but declined in 1824 to St. Petersburg to take part in the voyages of Otto von Kotzebue. The failed him and he practiced in St. Petersburg as a doctor until he the circumnavigation of Fyodor Petrovich Liitke (1826-1829) joined. From this trip he took with numerous zoological and botanical discoveries, which he began to study in St. Petersburg. He was appointed a member of the St. Petersburg Academy and joined in the summer of 1830 an expedition to Iceland to. However, the expedition was not allowed to go ashore at Iceland. On the return trip broke out on the ship typhus, a disease of which he died in St. Petersburg after his arrival.

According to Karl Heinrich Mertens, the epithet of the scientific name of mountain hemlock ( Tsuga mertensiana ) was named. He had discovered the way in today's Borough Sitka in Alaska.

Swell

• Wilhelm Olbers Focke: Mertens, Henry. In: General German Biography (ADB ). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, pp. 471 f