Background

Johan Harald Kylin was born on February 5, 1879, in Ornunga, Älvsborg, Sweden. He was the eldest of five sons and five daughters of Nils Henrik Olsson, a farmer, and the former Johanna Augusta Johannesdotter. Since Olsson is a very common name in Sweden, the children adopted the name Kylin, derived from the name of the family farm.

Education

In 1898 Kylin graduated from the Gymnasium in Göteborg and entered the University of Uppsala, receiving the Ph.D. in 1907 under Frans Reinhold Kjellman. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the marine flora of the west coast of Sweden.

Career

Following graduation, Kylin remained as a docent at Uppsala for thirteen years, during part of that time teaching in the Uppsala high school and the Uppsala teachers’ college. In 1912-1913 he was an investigator in the laboratory of Wilhelm Pfeffer at Leipzig. In 1920 Kylin was appointed a professor of botany (for anatomy and physiology) at the University of Lund, retiring in 1944.

Over the years he and his students published many papers dealing with the taxonomy, morphology, biochemistry, ecology, and physiology of the algae of this coast. Three of his last four major works constituted a taxonomic revision of the red (1944), brown (1947), and green (1949) algae of the Swedish west coast. Kylin also contributed significantly to knowledge of the marine algae of various other parts of the world: the west coast of Norway, which he visited in the summer of 1908; the red algae of the sub-Antarctic and Arctic (1919, with Carl Skottsberg); the red algae in the vicinity of Friday Harbor, Washington (1925); the Delesseriaceae (red algae) of New Zealand (1929); and the red algae of South Africa (1938) and of California (1941).

Kylin also studied the biochemistry and physiology of the algae. More than thirty papers dealing with pigments, storage products, pH relations, osmotic relations, and chemical composition of cell walls of various algae appeared between 1910 and 1946.

First and foremost a morphologist, Kylin, as he unraveled the step-by-step development of the vegetative and reproductive structures of the algae and details in their life histories, unearthed so much that was wrong with their taxonomy that he was always deeply involved in their systematics. In 1917, he revised the classification of the brown algae, basing his system largely on developmental and nuclear cycles. He recognized five orders. Utilizing the information that had accumulated since 1917, Kylin in 1933 erected a new system of classification of these algae, dividing them into three classes and twelve orders. This system has undergone much revision, but it served for a long time as a stimulating basis for research. In 1940 Kylin published an excellent taxonomic monograph on the brown algal order Chordariales.

Kylin’s greatest contributions to phycology came from his outstanding morphological and systematic studies of the class Florideophycidae, which includes the bulk of the red algae. Between 1914 and 1923 he published several papers on the developmental morphology of six genera of red algae. In 1923 his very significant monograph on the morphology of twenty-five genera appeared. In this paper, Kylin elaborated upon an earlier system of classification of the Florideophycidae based upon embryological details related to the mode of initiation and ontogeny of the generation developing from the fertilized egg, the carposporophyte.

Kylin saw that the ontogeny of practically every genus of red algae required a thorough investigation. To obtain properly prepared material he had to visit other parts of the world. In the summer of 1922, while his paper of 1923 was in press, he visited the United Stales, collecting at the Monterey Peninsula, La Jolla, Friday Harbor, and Woods Hole. In the summer of 1923, he visited the Isle of Man and Plymouth. In 1924 he returned to Friday Harbor to teach the laboratory’s summer course on the algae. In the summers of 1927 and 1928, he collected at Roscoff, Guéthary, and Banyuls in France; in 1929 he collected at Naples.

Using material obtained at these various places and that in the Agardh Herbarium at Lund, the most important algal herbarium in the world, Kylin published a series of very important morphological and taxonomic monographs, culminating in one on the order Gigartinales in 1932. Through these studies he immensely advanced knowledge of the morphology and interrelationships of members of the large and diversified phylum Rhodophyta. Despite certain shortcomings, Kylin’s system as outlined in his monograph of 1932 on the Gigartinales presents a much more natural arrangement of these algae than had previously been possible. His last great work, Die Gattungen der Rhodophyceen, which appeared posthumously in 1956 (Kylin’s widow, herself a biologist, saw it through the press), is the standard reference on the red algae.

Achievements

• Johan Harald Kylin is remembered as one of the leading Swedish phycologists of the 20th century. He published many papers dealing with the taxonomy, morphology, biochemistry, ecology, and biochemistry and physiology of the algae. In particular, he studied pigments, storage products, pH relations, osmotic relations, and chemical composition of cell walls of various algae. His greatest contributions to phycology came from his numerous works and outstanding morphological and systematic studies of the class Florideophycidae.
  
  The Kungliga Fysiografiska Siillskapet of Lund awarded him its gold Linné Medal.

Works

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  • Zur Kenntnis der subantarktischen und antarktischen Meeresalgen 1919
  • Die Gattungen Der Rhodophyceen 1956
  • Studien über die Algenflora der schwedischen Westküste 1907
  • Verzeichnis einiger Rhodophyceen von Südafrika 1938
  • The marine red algae in the vicinity of the biological station at Friday Harbor 1925

Membership

Kylin was elected to membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, and was a corresponding member of the Botanical Society of America and Societas pro Fauna et Flora Fennica.

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  Member

  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , Sweden

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  Member

  Royal Danish Academy of Sciences , Denmark

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  Corresponding member

  Botanical Society of America , United States

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  Corresponding member

  Societas pro Fauna et Flora Fennica , Finland

Connections

In 1924 Kylin married Elsa Sofia Jacobowsky; they had a son and a daughter. In later years he and his family usually spent the summer vacations at Kristineberg on that coast, conducting research in the marine biological laboratory located there.

Father:

Nils Henrik Olsson

Mother:

Johanna Augusta Johannesdotter

Spouse:

Elsa Sofia Jacobowsky

Doctoral advisor:

Frans Reinhold Kjellman

colleague:

Carl Skottsberg

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973