Elias Magnus Fries

Background

Elias Fries was born on August 15, 1794, in Femsjo, Småland, Sweden. His father was interested in natural history and inspired the same interest in his son.

Education

Elias graduated from the Gymnasium in Växjö and enrolled at the University of Lund in 1811. There his botanical interest took on a more serious character and was guided principally by the professor of botany, C. A. Agardh. Under Agardh, Fries took his degree in philosophy in 1814, having defended the first part of his dissertation “Novitiae florae Suecicae.”

Career

After graduating in 1814, Fries was appointed an associate professorship in botany, and in 1824, became a full professor at Lund University. During his first ten years at the university Fries devoted most of his studies to mycology, soon acquiring an international reputation. In 1815 he published the first volume of his first important work in mycological systematics, Observationes mycologicae. In 1821, when he was only twenty-seven he began publishing his Systema mycologicum, the great work which, more than anything else he wrote, brought him his fame.

For the lichens, then regarded as a natural class or order, Fries worked out a general systematics in his Lichenum dianome nova, partly inspired by the great Swedish lichenologist Acharius. In the second half of his twenties he was intensely absorbed by the lichens, and with his friend Christian Stenhammar, a vicar and naturalist, he published Lichenes Sueciae exsiccati, which consisted of dried specimens of lichens and an accompanying text. His lichenological studies were crowned by his authoritative Lichenographia Europaea reformata, containing a survey of all known lichens of Europe and information on their distribution.

In 1834 Fries became Borgström professor in applied economics at Uppsala University. The position was changed to "professor of botany and applied economics" in 1851. In 1849 he was also appointed director of the Uppsala University Botanical Garden. In 1853, he became rector of the University.

Throughout his life Fries was an extremely prolific writer. He strengthened his international position in mycology through a number of works, such as Epicrisis systematis mycologici; Monographia hymenomycetum Sueciae, which appeared both as a series of academic dissertations and as a separate work, Sveriges ätliga och giftiga svampar; and Icones selectae hymenomycetum nondum delineatorum, the second volume of which was published, following his wishes, by his sons Thore and Robert. Among the phanerogams such critical genera as Hieracium, Salix, and Carex were his favorites. His long floristic experience in Skåne was summarized in his Flora Scanica.

Fries’s foremost accomplishment in botany was in systematics. Almost from the beginning he showed a passion for understanding the underlying principles of this discipline and for tackling the questions concerning the real and natural relationship between plants and plant groups - all problems of great difficulty in the age before Darwin. A factor that proved critical for all his work was his encounter with the romantic German Naturphilosophie in the years after 1810. During his first decade as a systematist he admired Lorenz Oken and his extremely speculative system of nature, as presented in Oken’s Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Oken conceived of the universe as built of spiritual principles, the four “elements,” which in diverse combinations and refinements constitute animals and plants. At the same time the different classes of plants reflect in different degrees the main organs of an individual plant: the root, the stem, the flower, and the fruit. In Systema mycologicum Fries sought to apply Oken’s principles to fungus systematics. His four main groups of fungi - Coniomycetes, Hyphomycetes, Gasteromycetes, and Hymenomycetes - were thus considered as expressing diverse “cosmic moments,” very reminiscent of Oken’s “elements.” In this work Fries also took up ideas from Oken’s friend C. G. Nees von Esenbeck, whose highly romantic System der Pilze und Schwämme had been published in 1817. Nees argued that the fungi represent a special aspect of the vegetable world, its negative pole and autumn side, manifested in their conspicuous fruit bodies, which seemed to dominate their vegetable parts. In the same vein Fries spoke about a nisus reproductivus among the fungi, which separated this plant group from all other vegetables.

Already in Systema orbis vegetabilis Fries had to a great extent freed himself from the influence of Oken and Nees. Yet his views still reflected the same visionary and speculative romanticism, his conviction of nature’s inner spirituality and unity. He expressed his belief in a close relationship between human logic and nature’s way of separating the organisms into classes, orders, genera, and species. In every taxon he found four subdivisions, which in their turn could be divided in four units of lower degree. He called this consequent quartering a double dichotomy, reflecting the dichotomous method of ordinary logical division. Thus he divided the whole plant kingdom into the four groups Dicotyledoneae, Monocotyledoneae, Heteronemeae (ferns and mosses), and Homonemeae (algae and fungi).

Later, Fries gradually turned away from the extravagant speculation of his youth. More and more he became convinced that human reason could not grasp the great scheme according to which the Creator had distributed his creatures in systematic groups. Instead, he stated that one can trace the true relationships only through painstaking observation of the different species in their natural surroundings. In this context his vitalism became more and more apparent. Yet Fries never completely abandoned his vision of a great natural system that would cover all of the vegetable kingdom in some detail. This was to a certain degree realized in 1835 in his Flora scanica, and even there one could retrace fundamental points of view which had their origin in German romantic philosophy.

Achievements

• Elias Magnus Fries is considered to be a founder of modern fungal taxonomy. His best known work is Systema Mycologicum, in which he introduced a new system for classifying fungi. With the exception of a few changes with respect to microscopic discoveries, the system is still valid for many groups of fungi today. Fries also developed a system for classifying lichens based on the characters of their fruiting bodies, which was widely accepted until the use of the microscope revolutionized knowledge in this field.

Works

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  • Monographia Hymenomycetum Sueciae 1816
  • Systema Mycologicum 1821
  • Systema Orbis Vegetabilis 1825
  • Elenchus Fungorum 1828
  • Lichenographia Europaea Reformata 1831
  • Epicrisis Systematis Mycologici: Seu Synopsis Hymenomycetum 1838

Membership

Fries was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Connections

Son:

Theodor Magnus Fries

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography