Botanical Dissertations from the 19th and Early 20th Centuries at the Ohio State University Herbarium (OS)

Abstract

During the 19th century, candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Europe were required to submit and publish a dissertation on their research. Because fewer journals existed at that time, most theses were prepared and then printed locally, being used for the candidate's defense and subsequently distributed to colleagues throughout the world. The main center for research in science and technology toward the end of the 19th century and prior to WWI was the German-speaking world (Whitehead, 1925), which attracted scientists from other countries, especially from the U.S.A. In fact, the founder of our Ohio State University Herbarium, William Ashbrook Kellerman, received his Ph.D. in 1881 from the University of Zürich (Lowden, 1970). Locating unpublished German dissertations is not an easy task, as many were destroyed during WWI and WWII, and others are simply filed within unindexed reprint collections on deposit throughout Europe. A collection of 196 dissertations (Fig. 1) largely from the German-speaking world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been uncovered recently in the Archives of the Ohio State University Herbarium, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. (OS). These were part of a large botanical reprint collection of DePauw University that was gifted to Ohio State in September of 1984 (Stuessy, 1988). The reprint collection was curated at DePauw by Professors Truman George Yuncker (1891–1964) and Winona Hazel Welch (1896–1990), researchers on flowering plants (Cuscutaceae, Piperaceae) and bryophytes (Fontinalaceae), respectively (Dawson, 1988). Much of this reprint collection came initially from their major professor, William Trelease (1857–1945), who was head of the Department of Botany at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, from 1913 to 1926. Before locating to the University of Illinois, Trelease was the first Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden from 1889 to 1912. It is likely that upon his retirement from Illinois, the collection was sent to his research-active former students at DePauw, Yuncker and Welch. Prior to the Internet, reprint collections were indispensable in support of research in systematic botany. It is of further interest that Trelease made the donation to DePauw in honor of Agnes Chase, well-known grass taxonomist. How Trelease initially acquired the dissertations is unknown, presumably as gifts from European colleagues. The geographic representation of the dissertations is primarily throughout the German-speaking world. The majority of the dissertations (157) came from universities in Germany located in the following cities: Berlin, Bonn, Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), Erlangen, Freiburg, Göttingen, Greifswald, Halle, Jena, Kiel, Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), Leipzig, Marburg, Munich, Münster, Rostock, Strassburg (now Strasbourg in France), Tübingen, and Würzburg. Six dissertations were also completed in Sweden at the universities of Uppsala and Lund, and in Switzerland 15 from Zürich and seven from Bern. More recent dissertations include three from France (Paris) and one from the Netherlands (Utrecht). The time span of the dissertations ranges from 1849 to 1971 with the greatest concentration from 1870 to 1926. The frequency of appearance in France, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland during this period is shown in Fig. 2. The graph makes the point that botanical research in the German-speaking world during the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century was robust, peaking during 1911 to 1915, just prior to WWI. After the war, however, this all changed, with botany in the German world (and throughout Europe) being drastically curtailed, due to loss of institutions, personnel, and overall resources. The dissertations cover different topics and taxa (Table 1). The most common areas of focus are anatomy, morphology, systematics, and physiology (84% of total; Table 1). These would have been the major areas of botanical interest at the end of the 19th century. Other areas were also investigated, such as embryology, cytology, and reproductive biology, but these subdisciplines were still in early stages of development. The taxa studied were largely angiosperms (65%; Table 1) and vascular plants more broadly (an additional 9%), but there was also a clear interest in fungi (7%). Focus on all the other major taxonomic groups was much less. An important benefit from these dissertations derives from the Vita or Lebenslauf (curriculum vitae) appended usually at the end of the treatise (Fig. 3). These contain valuable information on the life of the candidate, often religious orientation, major professor, and other family details. Forty-four dissertations (22%) were simultaneously published in regular journals, as indicated on the dissertation itself, some in the well-known Botanisches Centralblatt, Engler's Botanische Jahrbücher, and Flora. Many appeared in very local outlets, e.g., Berichte der naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Freiburg and Jahreshefte des Vereins für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg. Important is that in the journal articles, personal details have been condensed to brief acknowledgments, which imparts the dissertations with biographical import far beyond their scientific content. For a full list of the dissertations, alphabetically by author and also categorized by topic and taxa, see the OS website (https://mbd.osu.edu/collections/herbarium → Herbarium Archives → Dissertations). Inquiries are welcomed.