Carl Johan Fredrik Skottsberg, 1880-1963

Abstract

Carl Johan Fredrik Skottsberg was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1950 when he was in his seventieth year. But if this and other international recognition came late in life it was amply manifest during the last three decades of his career. At the time of his death he was an Honorary or Corresponding Member of no less than 31 Scientific Societies of America, Argentine, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Hawaii, Holland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Poland. He was born on 1 December 1880 at Karlshamn, in southern Sweden, where his father, Carl Adolf Skottsberg, was Rector of the Boys’ School. His mother was Maria Louisa Pfeiffer. The boy matriculated in 1898 and, at the age of 18, entered as a student in the University of Uppsala where he graduated and obtained his Doctor’s Degree at the age of 27. That he was already highly regarded can be inferred from his appointment, in July of the same year, 1907, as a Lecturer in the University. Two years later he became Keeper of the Herbarium at the Botanical Museum of Uppsala. In 1901-1904 he had accompanied Professor Nordenskjold, as botanist to the Swedish Antarctic Expedition, and in the years 1907-1909 was Leader of the Swedish Magellan Expedition to the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Juan Fernandez Islands, Patagonia and South Georgia. These expeditions not only established his reputation as a taxonomist but initiated his abiding interest in problems of geographical distribution, especially in relation to the Pacific region.