This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Christian Hendrik Persoon is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
| Christian Hendrik Persoon | |
 |
|
| Born | 1761 Cape of Good Hope, South Africa |
|---|---|
| Died | 1836 |
| Residence | Netherlands, Gottingen, Paris |
| Fields | Mycology, Taxonomy |
| Known for | establishing starting points for fungal taxonomy |
| Author abbreviation (botany) | Pers. |
Christian Hendrik Persoon (February 1, 1761 - November 16, 1836) was a mycologist who made additions to Linnaeus' mushroom taxonomy.
Contents |
Early life
Persoon was born in South Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, the third child of an immigrant Pomeranian father and Dutch mother.1 His mother died soon after he was born; at the age of thirteen his father (who died a year later) sent him to Europe for his education.
Education
Initially studying theology at Halles, at age 22 (in 1784) Persoon switched to medicine at Leiden and Göttingen. He received a doctorate from the "Kaiserlich-Leopoldinisch-Carolinische Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher" in 1799.2
Later years
He moved to Paris in 1802, where he spent the rest of his life, renting an 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.3
Academic career
The origin of Persoon's botanical interest is unknown. The earliest of his works was Abbildungen der Schwämme (Illustrations of the sponges), published in three parts, in 1790, 1791, and 1793. Between 1805 and 1807, he published two volumes of his Synopsis plantarum, 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.
The genus Persoonia, a variety of small Australian trees and shrubs, was named after him.
References
- Duane Isely, One hundred and one botanists (Iowa State University Press, 1994), pp. 124-126.
- ^ Chater A.O., Brummitt, R.K. (1966). Subspecies in the works of Christiaan Hendrik Persoon. Taxon 15(4):143-8.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Brummitt, R. K.; C. E. Powell (1992). Authors of Plant Names, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. ISBN 1-84246-085-4.
External links
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 23 November 2008, at 22:43.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Christian Hendrik Persoon".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.