Prof. Bohumil Němec

Abstract

PROF. BOHUMIL NĚMEC, the well-known botanist, celebrated his seventy-fifth anniversary in Prague on March 12, and we are glad to report that he was then in good health. He is at present engaged upon a comprehensive text-book of general botany in Slovak for use by students at Bratislava University and for upper forms in the Slovak high schools, and a history of botany which will have a wider appeal. Nnec‘s first researches, on diplopods, appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Bohemian Scientific Society in 1895, and since then he has published many researches in plant physiology in Czech, English and other journals. Only recently he exhibited to scientific audiences in England and France specimens of gold that had been extracted from ashes of plants obtained from Slovakia. He has been interested in the occurrence in plants of unusual elements for many years. Němec is not only a great experimentalist and investigator but also an able lecturer, and many of his students have contributed to the advancement of pure and applied botany. Practically all Czechoslovakia‘s scientific forestry and agricultural experts studied under him at the Botanical Institute of the Charles University of Prague, which he directed for so many years. Since 1945 he has been occupied at the University of Bratislava in lecturing to Slovak students, and has advised on, and supervised, the establishment of botanical and physiological institutes in that University, which dates only from* 1919.