Background

Ethnicity: Keyserling's family was of Westphalian origin and was originated in Herford.

Alexander von Keyserling was born on August 15, 1815, in Kabillen Manor, Kabillen, Courland Governorate (now Kabile, Kuldiga Municipality, Latvia), then part of the Russian Empire. He was the fifth son of nine children of Count Heinrich Dietrich Wilhelm Keyserling and the former Anne Nolde. The family was considered part of the Uradel, or old nobility.

Education

Keyserling received a good education and in 1834 began to study law at Humboldt University of Berlin. Under the influence of Buch and Humboldt, whom he met there, he became interested in natural sciences and chose geology as his specialty. In 1842 the University awarded him a doctorate. Here he also met with future German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and John Lothrop Motley, with whom he became lifelong friends.

Career

In 1840 Keyserling returned to Russia and a year later became an official handling special missions in the Mining Department. Being financially secure, he did not have to consider permanent employment; and in 1850 he left government service. He settled down on his estate in Estonia and continued his scientific research.

Keyserling began his scientific research while still a student. With the zoologist J. H. Blasius, later a professor at Brunswick, he made a number of excursions in the Carpathians and the Alps, collecting material for his first scientific paper (1837). Later they studied vertebrates of Europe.

Keyserling returned to Russia with Blasius, and they participated in A. K. Meyendorff’s expedition that studied the natural resources and industry of European Russia. In 1841 Keyserling joined the special expedition conducted by Murchison to study the geological structure of European Russia and the Urals; and he studied a vast area - the Kirghiz steppes - along the left bank of the Volga southwest of Orenburg.

To process the material collected there Keyserling visited Paris and London in 1842. A year later he took part in another expedition, to study the geological structure of the Pechora basin, the northern Urals, and Timan. Previously this area was virtually unknown geologically, and Keyserling’s research provided extensive new material on the geological structure and the paleontology of Paleozoic and Jurassic deposits developed there.

The paper he published was included in the second volume of a large summary of the geology of Russia published by Murchison, P. E. de Verneuil, and Keyserling in 1845, in which the greater part of the paleontological section is Keyserling’s. After he retired from his official posts in 1850 Keyserling practically gave up traveling until 1860, when he made several crossings of the Pyrenees with Verneuil.

From 1862 to 1869 he was a trustee of the Dorpat (now Tartu) educational region. With J. F. Schmidt he founded a museum of natural history in Reval (Tallinn), which has the world’s richest collections of Ordovician and Silurian fauna of the Baltic provinces.

Achievements

• Alexander von Keyserling is considered one of the founders of Russian geology and was a great contributor to zoology and botany. He also contributed substantially to the progress of culture and education in the Baltic provinces. He received numerous awards, including the Order of St. Vladimir, 2nd and 4th class; the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 2nd and 1st class; and the Order of Saint Anna, 3rd and 1st class; and the Demidov Prize.
  
  Keyserling’s titles at the court were gentleman in attendance and court tutor, as well as a land counselor of Estland.
  
  He is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of gecko, Teratoscincus keyserlingii.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Die Wirbelthiere Europa's 1840
  • Polypodiacea Et Cyathacea Herbarii Bungeani 1873
  • Geology 1845

Views

Keyserling paid great attention to the study of extinct organisms, and many of his papers are devoted to descriptions of fossils collected by other researchers during their Siberian investigations. Along with the usual descriptions Keyserling’s geological papers contain elements of facies analysis, which was quite new at that time. Thus in 1842, on the basis of the lithology and color of the rocks, he reconstructed the changing paleogeographical conditions in the Carboniferous sea of the Moscow Basin.

Keyserling had an active interest in botany and worked out the systematics of the fern genus Adiantum. This research provided him with abundant material for theoretical deductions in biology. He came to the conclusion that the entire complex of plants and animals inhabiting the earth originated through the evolution of primitive cellular elements, or protoplasts. In 1853 he suggested that under the chemical effects of various elements the embryos of living beings undergo a transformation that leads to the creation of new species. In this process only the most adaptable survive, the others becoming extinct. At that time such ideas were very daring and new.

Charles Darwin praised Keyserling’s views, referring to him in The Origin of Species (1859) as one of his predecessors. Darwin’s theory of evolution had a marked effect upon Keyserling; under its influence he changed his views substantially but never became a consistent evolutionist, believing that the changes of a species take place abruptly rather than by gradual modification.

Membership

In 1858 the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences elected Keyserling corresponding member, and in 1887 granted him the title of honorary academician. He was also an honorary or corresponding member of numerous Russian and foreign scientific societies, including the mineralogical society of St. Petersburg and the geological societies of London and Paris; and for many years he was president of the Agricultural Society of Estonia.

Connections

In 1844 Keyserling married Zinaida Kankrina, the daughter of Russia’s minister of finance. The couple had one son, Lev, and two daughters, Elena and Maria. His grandson Hermann von Keyserling became a well-known philosopher; his nephew Eduard Graf von Keyserling was a renowned writer.

Father:

Heinrich Dietrich Wilhelm Graf von Keyserlingk

Mother:

Annette Amalia Benigna von Keyserlingk

Spouse:

Zinaida Kankrina

Brother:

Otto Ulrich Johann Graf von Keyserlingk

Brother:

Georg Theodor Carl Graf von Keyserlingk

Sister:

Louise Charlotte Dorothea Wilhelmine Baronesse von Keyserling

Brother:

Peter Wilhelm Carl Ludwig Robert Graf von Keyserlingk

Brother:

Eduard Ernst Hermann Keyserling

Brother:

Werner Hermann Theophil Graf von Kayserlingk

Sister:

Amalia Justina Auguste Christine von Keyserlingk

Sister:

Eveline Theophile Wilhelmine Auguste Johanna Julie Baronesse von Behr

Son:

Lev Graf von Keyserling

Daughter:

Maria Keyserling

Daughter:

Elena Keyserling

mentor:

Christian Leopold Freiherr von Buch

mentor:

Alexander von Humboldt

Friend:

Otto von Bismarck

Friend:

John Lothrop Motley

colleague:

Johann Heinrich Blasius

colleague:

J. F. Schmidt

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973