Christiaan Hendrik Persoon
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Redirect Template:Infobox scientist
Christiaan Hendrik Persoon (31 December 1761<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> – 16 November 1836) was a Cape Colony mycologist who is recognized as one of the founders of mycological taxonomy.
Early life
[edit]Persoon was born in Cape Colony at the Cape of Good Hope, the third child of an immigrant Pomeranian father, Christiaan Daniel Persoon, and Dutch mother, Wilhelmina Elizabeth Groenwald.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> His mother died soon after he was born. In 1775, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to Europe for his education. His father died a year later in 1776.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Education
[edit]Initially a student of theology at Halle, Persoon switched his studies to medicine, which he pursued in Leiden and then Göttingen. He received a doctorate from the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher in Erlangen 1799.<ref>de Zeeuw, R. (1939). Notes on the life of Persoon. Mycologia 31(3): 369-70.</ref>
Later years
[edit]He moved to Paris by 1803, where he spent the rest of his life, renting the upper floor of a house in a poor part of town. He was apparently unemployed, unmarried, poverty-stricken and a recluse, although he corresponded with botanists throughout Europe. Because of his financial difficulties, Persoon agreed to donate his herbarium to the House of Orange, in return for an adequate pension for life.<ref>Petersen R.H. (1977). Some brief reflections on C.H. Persoon. Kew Bulletin 31(3):695-98.</ref>
Academic career
[edit]The origin of Persoon's botanical interest is unknown. The earliest of his works was Abbildungen der Schwämme (Illustrations of the fungi), published in three parts, in 1790, 1791, and 1793. In 1794, Persoon introduced the term Template:Lichengloss for the furrowed ascomata of the lichen genus Graphis.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> From 1805 to 1807, he published two volumes of his Synopsis plantarum (Template:Webarchive), a popular work describing 20,000 species of all types of plants. But his pioneering work was in the fungi, for which he published several works, beginning with the Synopsis methodica fungorum (1801); it is the starting point for nomenclature of the Uredinales, Ustilaginales, and the Gasteromycetes. Persoon described many polypore species; most were from his own collections in central Europe, while several other tropical species were sent to him from collections made by French botanist Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré during his circumglobal expedition. These latter fungi are among the first tropical polypores ever described.<ref name="Ryvarden 1973"/> In 1815, Persoon was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Persoon was a prolific author of new fungal species, having formally described 2269 in his career.<ref name="Lücking 2020">Template:Cite journal</ref>
Recognition
[edit]The genus Persoonia, a variety of small Australian trees and shrubs, was named after him. The title Persoonia is also given to a biannual scientific journal of molecular phylogeny and evolution of fungi, published jointly by the National Herbarium of the Netherlands and the CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- Duane Isely, One hundred and one botanists (Iowa State University Press, 1994), pp. 124–126.
External links
[edit]Template:Commons category Template:Wikisource author Template:Wikispecies
- German taxonomists
- 1761 births
- 1836 deaths
- Mycologists
- Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
- Cape Colony botanists
- 18th-century German botanists
- 19th-century German botanists
- 18th-century German writers
- 18th-century German male writers
- 19th-century German writers
- 19th-century German male writers
- Members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences