Heinrich Georg Bronn

Heinrich Georg Bronn (3 March 1800 – 5 July 1862) was a German geologist and paleontologist. He was the first to translate Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species into German in 1860, although not without introducing his own interpretations, as also a chapter critiquing the work.

Bibliography

Bronn was born at Ziegelhausen (now part of Heidelberg) in the electoral Palatinate. Studying at the university of Heidelberg he took his doctor's degree in the faculty of medicine in 1821, and in the following year was appointed professor of natural history. He now devoted himself to palaeontological studies, and to field-work in various parts of Germany, Italy and France.[1]

From its commencement in 1830 to 1862 he assisted in editing the Jahrbuch für Mineralogie continued as Neues Jahrbuch. His principal work, Letkaea Geognostica (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1834–1838; 3rd ed. with F. Romer, 3 vols., 1851–1856), has been regarded as one of the foundations of German stratigraphical geology.[1]

His Handbuch einer Geschichte der Natur, of which the first part was issued in 1841, gave a general account of the physical history of the earth, while the second part dealt with the life-history, species being regarded as direct acts of creation. The third part included his Index Palaeontologicus, and was issued in 3 vols., 1848–1849, with the assistance of Hermann von Meyer and Heinrich Göppert. This record of fossils has proved of inestimable value to all palaeontologists.[1] Bronn's quantitative analysis of the appearance of specific fossils revealed that particular species, such as the ammonites, appeared and disappeared at different times in the fossil record.[2]

An important work on recent and fossil zoology, Die Klassen und Ordnungen des Thier-Reichs, was commenced by Bronn. He wrote the volumes dealing with Amorphozoa, Actinozoa, and Malacozoa, published 1859–1862; the work was continued by other naturalists. Bronn was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1860.[3] In 1861 Bronn was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London. He died at Heidelberg.[1]

He speculated on evolutionary ideas of adaptation and selective breeding before Charles Darwin in the 1850s but did not fully embrace the transmutation of species.[4] He translated On the Origin of Species by Darwin into the German language.[5][4] In 1858, Bronn proposed a "tree of life" as a means of depicting the genealogical relationships among organisms.[6][a]

Works

References

  1. ^ a b c d Chisholm 1911.
  2. ^ Everts, Sarah (2016). "Information Overload". Distillations. 2 (2): 26–33. Retrieved 20 March 2018.
  3. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
  4. ^ a b Gliboff, Sander (2007). "H. G. Bronn and the History of Nature". Journal of the History of Biology. 40 (2): 259–294. doi:10.1007/s10739-006-9114-4. ISSN 0022-5010. JSTOR 29737482. PMID 18186159. S2CID 36159200.
  5. ^ Junker T. 1991. Heinrich Georg Bronn and Origin of Species. (English abstract). Sudhoffs Arch. 1991;75(2):180–208.
  6. ^ Bronn, H.G. (1858). Untersuchungen über die Entwicklungs-Gesetze der organischen Welt während der Bildungs-Zeit unserer Erd-Oberfläche [Investigations of the laws of the development of the organic world during the period of formation of our Earth's surface] (in German). Stuttgart, (Germany): F. Schweizerbart. pp. 481–482.

Notes

  1. ^ (Bronn, 1858) The tree of life diagram appears on p. 481, and the explanation of the diagram appears on pp. 481–482. From pp. 481–482, starting from "Anm. Es ergibt sich aus den vorangehenden Untersuchungen, … ": "Note: It emerges from the preceding investigations that not only the invertebrate animals, the fishes, the reptiles, the warm-blooded birds and mammals and finally Man only gradually appeared one after the other – yet also in the individual subkingdoms of the radiata, molluscs, insects, fishes, the higher branches of the system appeared only after the lower [ones] – however in a way that the higher twig of a lower branch often developed later than the lower twig of a higher branch. If one wants to represent this relation by an image, then it will correspond to a tree-shaped image of the system, in which the higher or lower position of the different twigs would be sure to express the absolute level of organization of each individual twig, no matter whether it [i.e., the twig] sits on a higher or lower branch. Thus, the twig a on the lowest branch A developed earlier than branch B, but twig c of the first branch [A developed] only after twig b of the second [branch B] and with twig c of the second [branch] (B) and of third branch (C). The first twig g of the fourth branch D only emerged after the first twig f of the following branch E appeared, and so forth. – In almost all groups and classes of the system, it is a discernable phenomenon that the highest classes of a lower group, the highest orders of a lower class are definitely more perfect than the lowest classes of the next higher group and the lowest orders of the next higher class (we recall the Amphioxus as the lowest fish and the octopus as the highest mollusc, between which nevertheless the whole group of the insects lies): – and so it can often be consistent with the law of progressive development that an animal group M appeared after the animal group P, because it is more perfectly organized, although it belongs to a lower branching of the system than that [one, namely P]."

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