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OTTO KUNTZE
Otto Carl Ernst Kuntze (* June 23, 1843 in Leipzig; † 1907 in San Remo) was a German botanist.
He was an apothecary in his early career, with a detailed knowledge of Leipzig's flora. As a matter of course, he published a "Pocket fauna of Leipzig". Between 1863 and 1866, he was a merchant in Berlin and travelled through central Europe und Italy. From 1868 to 1873 he had his own factory for essential oils, and attained a comfortable standard of living. He then travelled around the world between 1874 and 1876, to the Caribbean, USA, Japan, China, South East Asia, Arabian peninsula and Egypt. The journal of these travels he published as "Around the World" (1881). From 1876 to 1878 he studied Natural Science in Berlin and Leipzig and gained his doctorate in Freiburg writing about the drug made from Cinchona. He curated the botanical collection from his world voyage encompassing 7,700 specimens in Berlin and Kew Gardens.
The publication came as a shock to botany, since Kuntze had entirely revised the taxonomy. His two volume treatise, Revisio generum plantarum (1891) was widely rejected or deliberately ignored.
In 1886, Kuntze sees the Russian Near East, and 1887 to 1888 he spent on the Canary Islands. The results of both journeys, became part of his main work, the Revision. At the beginning of the 1890s, he left for South America, of which he managed to see nearly all countries. In 1894, he visits the Southern African countries as well as the German colonies. In the last years of his life, Kuntze moved permanently to San Remo (Italy). His revolutionary ideas about the botanic nomenclature result in a conflict at the 2nd Congress of Botany, as a result of which the doors of academia are closed behind him. He dies in San Remo two years later.
Biographical articles
- Barnhart, John Hendley (1913): Otto Kuntze. Bulletin of the Charleston Museum. volume 9: 65-68.
- Hemsley,W. B. (1907): Dr. Otto Kuntze. Kew Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information: 100-101.
- Stafleu, Frans A. (1978): Kuntze, Carl Ernst Otto. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 15: 268-269.
- Urban, Ignatio (1902): II. Notae biographicae peregrinatorum Indiae occidentalis botanicorum. Leipzig Gebrüder Bornträger: 70-71.
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