Background
Joseph Gaertner was born on March 12, 1732, in Calw, Germany. He was the son of a court physician.
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, 72074 Tübingen, Germany
In 1751 Joseph entered the University of Tübingen, where he came under the influence of Haller. He received the Doctor of Medicine degree from Tübingen in 1753.
anatomist Botanist educator scientist
Joseph Gaertner was born on March 12, 1732, in Calw, Germany. He was the son of a court physician.
Orphaned at a young age, Joseph was first destined for the church, then law, and finally medicine. In 1751 he entered the University of Tübingen, where he came under the influence of Haller. He received the Doctor of Medicine degree from Tübingen in 1753 with his dissertation “De viis urinae ordinariis et extraordinariis,” but he did not practice medicine. After visiting several cities in Italy, he arrived in Lyons, then spent six months each in Montpellier and Paris, and tarried in England for nearly a year, pursuing mathematics, optics, and mechanics. During 1759 he attended with enthusiasm Adrian van Royen’s botany lectures at Leiden.
Gaertner was professor of anatomy in Tübingen in 1760, and was appointed professor of botany at St. Petersburg in 1768, but returned to Calw in 1770. Learning that Sir Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, and the Forsters had brought back rich collections of plants and seeds from Cook’s voyages around the world, Gaertner hastened to England in the spring of 1778, seeking to add these novelties to his survey of fruits and seeds. He found Banks openhanded in granting their study and in gifts of duplicates for use in De fructibus. At Rotterdam, Gaertner met Karl Thunberg, who, recently returned from South Africa and Japan, also generously assisted him. From these collections, as well as those found in botanical gardens at Leiden, Amsterdam, and Lyons, and pharmaceutical plots at Stuttgart, Gaertner proposed fifty new genera.
De fructibus was issued in five parts, the first late in 1788. The Supplementum carpologicae, issued in three parts, was published in Leipzig by Gaertner’s son, Karl Friedrich. Volume I of De fructibus was fittingly dedicated to Banks and illustrated from Gaertner’s sketches with 180 copperplate drawings by Gaertner and by Hermann Jakob Tyroff. The work, however, went almost unnoticed in Germany where only 200 copies were sold in three years, and this commercial failure even threatened its completion. Yet in France, it met with appreciation, coming as it did at the same time as Jussieu’s Genera plantarum.
Gaertner demonstrated that the spores of Cryptogamia, being without an embryo yet capable of germination, were essentially different from seeds of Phanerogamia, which contain an embryo. He recognized that the early stages of an organ presented more significant information on origins and affinities of different forms than did a comparison of their mature condition. He established terminology, heretofore vague, for fruits and seeds. He distinguished between the pericarp, however dry and anomalous it may be in one-seeded fruits, and integuments. Further, he characterized endosperm as distinct from cotyledons, which he correctly interpreted as appendages of the embryo. His scheme of classifying fruits and seeds contributed importantly to Jussieu’s emerging natural system of plant families.
The Achilles’ heel of Gaertner’s interpretation was his concept of what he called the vitellus, a term he used to embrace such diverse structures as the scutellum of grasses, cotyledons of Zamia, and the spore contents of various Cryptogamia. In the course of examining the reproductive structures of Spirogyra, Gaertner witnessed zygospore formation. This observation led Johann Hedwig to suggest, and Jean Vaucher subsequently to assert, that true sexuality occurs in algae.
Joseph Gaertner was a fellow of the Royal Society.