Background

Karl Goebel was born on March 8, 1855, in Billigheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. Although his full style was Karl Immanuel Eberhard Ritter von Goebel, he called himself simply Karl Goebel throughout his life.

Education

Intended by his family for the church, Goebel was educated at the Evangelical College of Blaubeuren and thence, at the age of eighteen, went to study theology and philosophy at Tübingen. There he came under the influence of Wilhelm Hofmeister and realized his true inclination toward science. After some mental conflict - since he did not wish to disappoint his mother - he persuaded her of his interest and devoted himself to botany. At this time he also began his extensive botanical travels. Hofmeister fell ill before Goebel completed his training, and in 1876 he transferred to Strasbourg to study with Heinrich Anton de Bary. Here he took his doctorate.

Career

After graduating Goebel worked for a short time at the biological station at Naples. In 1878 Julius von Sachs appointed him his assistant at Würzburg, and he qualified as Privatdozent. He thus had the advantage of contact with three of the outstanding botanical figures of his time - he received inspiration from Hofmeister in the widest aspects of the newly arising morphology; from de Bary in plant anatomy and mycology; and from Sachs in physiology.

After four years as Sachs’s assistant, Goebel was appointed professor at Rostock and in 1887 at Marburg. In 1891 he moved to Munich, where he was a professor of botany and later general director of the State Scientific Collections, retiring emeritus in 1931. Goebel was also editor of "Flora" from 1889 onwards.

Goebel’s principal administrative achievement in Munich was the removal of the botanical laboratories and gardens from their cramped quarters near the main railway station in the center of town to the edge of the Bavarian royal park at Nymphenburg. The gardens and greenhouses were his particular concern. Through the years he enriched them with specimens collected on his many journeys (which took him to the Rockies, the Andes, the New Zealand Alps, and the Indian Ghats, among other places). Under his supervision, the installation became second in Germany only to that in Berlin.

As a botanist, Goebel drew upon that great wealth of data accumulated in the late nineteenth century through use of the compound light microscope. One of the great problems of the time was to decide how this great assembly of facts could best be codified and studied, and it was Goebel’s contribution to see and industriously apply a profitable method to the existing corpus of information and to his own collections. That he early established a reputation as a botanist of wide knowledge and great objectivity is testified to by Sachs’s decision to ask Goebel to assist him in the preparation of a new edition of his textbook, entrusting him with the sections on systematics and special morphology.

By the middle of the nineteenth-century plant studies, which up until then had been mainly observational, had begun to harden into a rigid formalism. His principal work, Organographie der Pflanzen, was published in 1898. The significance of Goebel’s work for botanical science lay in the fact that it provided one of the main bridges from the achievements of observation to the fully-fledged experimental science of the twentieth century. Earlier attempts had been premature; organography itself was transitional because methods were not yet in existence to enable it to be carried to its logical conclusion. Goebel, however, lived long enough to see the first developments of experimental plant physiology and biochemistry, although not perhaps their coordination with the subtler levels of structure, to which his organography had pointed.

Achievements

• Karl Goebel was an eminent botanist. His main fields of study were comparative functional anatomy, morphology, and the developmental physiology of plants under the influence of both phylogenetic and extrinsic factors. He was awarded the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society of London in 1931.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Organographie der Pflanzen Insbesondere der Archegoniaten und Samenpflanzen

    (Volume 2)

    1898
  • Organographie der Pflanzen, Insbesondere der Archegoniaten und Samenpflanzen

    (Volume 3)

    1901
  • Grundzüge der Systematik und Speciellen Pflanzenmorphologie 1897
  • Flora, oder Allgemeine Botanische Zeitung 1892

Religion

Goebel quoted freely from the Bible, although with age he became increasingly cool toward the church.

Views

His contemporaries regarded Goebel as the exponent of an extreme materialistic view of living things, yet he thought highly of Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital, could speak of the Logos in nature, and held Hegelian viewpoints to which he had been introduced as a student at Tübingen. The objectivity of his ideas and their freedom from the rigidity and speculation that were simultaneously besetting the older schools made his influence on later work very considerable.

Goebel preferred objective research to speculation. For him this meant observation and simple experimentation on the great variety of living plants. To a friend he expressed regret that he did not have the knowledge of the exact sciences necessary to carry his experimental studies to the biochemical level. He was, however, impatient of gadgetry and the niceties of preparation and rarely used a microtome for his sections.

An unfortunate by-product of Darwinism among botanists had been an excessive preoccupation with phylogenetic speculation. This Goebel despised. He once said, for example, that concern about the “natural system” of seed plants seemed about as hopeless as attempting to return to its original paper bags the confetti scattered during the Munich carnival.

Quotations: “If an angel from heaven came down to give the botany lectures, the medics would still not turn up.”

Membership

In 1892 Goebel became a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1910 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1914 he was named a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, and in 1926 was elected to the Royal Society.

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  Bavarian Academy of Sciences , Germany

  1892 - 1932

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  Royal Society of Edinburgh , United Kingdom

  1910 - 1932

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  Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei , Italy

  1914 - 1932

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1926 - 1932

Personality

Goebel’s success as a teacher resulted from his clarity and impartiality, but he is said to have underrated his didactic powers. His aloofness in the lecture hall and laboratory appears to have been a pedagogic device which Goebel deemed useful. With his students in the field, or even during evening discussions, he was more relaxed. And those botanists who have left records of meeting him on his travels have all done so with affectionate admiration. Beyond the vast knowledge of his special subject, Goebel had a cultivated and philosophic mind.

Connections

colleague:

Heinrich Anton de Bary

colleague:

Julius von Sachs

colleague:

Wilhelm Hofmeister

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography