Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten

Hermann Karsten, 1894

Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten (6 November 1817, in Stralsund – 10 July 1908, in Zoppot) was a German botanist and geologist.

BiographyEdit

Born in Stralsund, he followed the example of Alexander von Humboldt and traveled 1844-56 the northern part of South America (Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia). From 1856 to 1868, he was a professor at the agricultural college in Berlin, afterwards serving as a professor of plant physiology at the University of Vienna (1868–72).<ref>© Universität Zürich, Zürcher Herbarien Template:Webarchive short biography</ref> In 1881, at the suggestion of David Friedrich Weinland, Karsten became convinced of the correctness of Otto Hahn's organic theory of the chondrites and, as a result, wrote an essay entitled "Die Meteorite und ihre Organismen"<ref>http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/249495308 WorldCat permalink</ref> in which he declared his support for Hahn's theory. He died 1908 in Berlin-Grunewald.

As a taxonomist, he was the binomial author of many botanical species.<ref>IPNI List of plants described and co-described by Karsten.</ref>

Florae Columbiae ... 1859–1869. (Vol. 1: Digital edition / Vol. 2: Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf)
Chemismus der Pflanzenzelle 1869.
Deutsche Flora. Pharmaceutisch-medicinische Botanik 1880-1883; second edition 1894–1895.
"Hermann Karsten (1851) y Wilhelm Sievers (1888): las primeras descripciones e interpretaciones sobre el órigen de las terrazas aluviales en la Córdillera de Mérida." C. Schubert. Bol. Hist. Geocien. Venez., 44, pp 15–19
"Die Meteorite und ihre Organismen", 1881 - The Meteorite and its Organisms.<ref>https://archive.org/details/the-meteorite-and-its-organisms archive.org English translation</ref>