German botanist and geologist. Hermann Karsten was born in Straslund in the province of Pomerania, where he made his first collections of plants and insects. Apprenticed to a pharmacist and later educated in natural history, he was awarded a doctorate from Trendelenburg for his dissertation, De Cella Vitali, in 1843. The next year he went to Venezuela at the invitation of a friend with business interests in Puerto Cabello. He stayed on the coast in San Esteban, where he made his first study of tropical plants, particularly the tree ferns, cycads, and palms of the region, and at Colonia Tovar, founded by German settlers in 1843, where he met the botanist Karl Moritz, after whom he named one of his local discoveries, Cinchona moritziana.
In 1847 he returned to Europe, settling in Berlin, where he sold a large selection of Colombian plants to pay for further travels, and published his first book, Die Vegetationsorgane der Palmen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichende Anatomie und Physiologie. Between 1848 and 1856, he collected in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. His collections and observations on Cinchona formed the basis of his next publication, Die Medinicinischen Chinarinden Neu-Grenada (1848). During his stay in Bogotà, he became acquainted with local botanists José de Caldas, José Celestino Mutis, and José Triana, and with the latter made preparations for a flora that culminated in two separate works, Triana's Prodromus Florae Novo-Granatensis (1862-1867) and Karsten's Florae Columbiae (1859-1869). Karsten also collected fossils and geological specimens, which were sent to Berlin, and wrote several works on the geology of Colombia, one of them at the request of the President of the Republic, Mosquera. On his return, he accepted a professorship in botany at Berlin and received an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Greiswald. In 1868 he moved his plant physiology laboratory to the University in Vienna, where he made a series of publications on European floras with special reference to medical plants, the last in 1895. He died in Berlin in 1908 at the age of 92.
Sources:
A.F. Tryon, 1963, "Hermann Ksrsten, his collections and the Flora Columbiae", Taxon, 12(3): 103-105.
