Nathanael Pringsheim
| Nathanael Pringsheim | |
|---|---|
Nathanael Pringsheim
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| Born | 30 November 1823 Landsberg, Prussian Silesia |
| Died |
6 October 1894 (aged 70) Berlin |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | botany |
| Alma mater |
Breslau Leipzig Berlin |
| Known for | algology |
Nathanael Pringsheim (30 November 1823 – 6 October 1894) was a German botanist.
Nathanael Pringsheim was born at Landsberg, Prussian Silesia, and studied at the universities of Breslau, Leipzig, and Berlin successively. He graduated in 1848 as doctor of philosophy with the thesis De forma et incremento stratorum crassiorum in plantarum cellula, and rapidly became a leader in the great botanical renaissance of the 19th century.
His contributions to scientific phycology were of striking interest. Pringsheim was among the very first to demonstrate the occurrence of a sexual process in this class of plants, and he drew from his observations weighty conclusions as to the nature of sexuality.
Together with the French investigators Gustave Adolphe Thuret (1817-1875) and Jean-Baptiste Édouard Bornet (1828-1911), Pringsheim ranks as the founder of our scientific knowledge of the algae. Among his researches in this field may be mentioned those on Vaucheria (1855), the Oedogoniaceae (1855-1858), the Coleochaeteae (1860), Hydrodictyon (1861), and Pandorina (1869); the last-mentioned memoir bore the title Beobachtungen über die Paarung de Zoosporen. This was a discovery of fundamental importance; the conjugation of zoospores was regarded by Pringsheim, with good reason, as the primitive form of sexual reproduction.
A work on the course of morphological differentiation in the Sphacelariaceae (1873), a family of marine algae, is of great interest, inasmuch as it treats of evolutionary questions; the authors point of view is that of Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817-1891) rather than Darwin. Closely connected with Pringsheim's algological work was his long-continued investigation of the Saprolegniaceae, a family of algoid fungi, some of which have become notorious as the causes of disease in fish.
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