German morphologist and professor of botany at the University of Munich for 40 years (1891-1930). Goebel was best known for his work Organographie der Pflanzen (Organography of Plants, 1898-1901).
Karl Immanuel Eberhard Goebel (later Karl Ritter von Goebel) was born in Billigheim in Baden, southern Germany. His botanical interest was aroused by the beauties of the Swabian Alps, an area that he was as passionate about as any of the exotic places he ever visited around the world, and where he met with the accident that led to his demise. Initially studying theology at the University of Tübingen, Goebel also attended botany lectures and became a devoted student of the great Wilhelm Hofmeister. When Hofmeister fell ill, Goebel decided to complete his botany studies at Strasbourg in 1876, where H.A. de Bary further shaped his scientific thinking. Going on to take his doctor's degree, he entered military service in Würzburg (1877-1878), where Julian Sachs appointed him assistant. Goebel soon developed an avid taste for travelling, making his first voyage to the tropics in the 1880s, to India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Java, where he met up with his friend M. Treub, director of the Buitenzorg garden. He later travelled to Australia and South America, returning to Java later in his life. His wide knowledge of tropical biology inspired and provided the backbone for much of his work while he taught at the universities of Rostock (1882-1887), Marburg (1887-1891) and Munich. Despite all his travel and the dangers no doubt encountered during such expeditions, it was while walking in the Swabian Alps that he fell and broke his shoulder, later dying of heart failure due to the injury.
Goebel's chief interest was morphology, his key work being Organographie der Pflanzen. Organographie was the result of publisher Gustav Fischer, of Jena, approaching Goebel in 1895 to write a work on morphology of plants. The first part appeared in 1898 and the resulting work (including two more parts published in 1899-1901) became the standard morphology text of Goebel's lifetime, being revised twice over the next 30 years and supplementary texts added. The final revised part was published posthumously on his birthday in March 1933, while the first edition (the only one to be translated into English) was reprinted in the 1970s. F.O. Bower, in his 1933 obituary of Goebel, called it 'impressive whether as the achievement of a single brain, or as the epitome of a life of restless activity and of unusual opportunity. Nothing like it had appeared before in the history of Botany'.
The word organography was coined by A.-P. de Candolle, who meant it to extend over and above the mere description of organs to infer their development. Goebel's aim was indeed to impart a causal approach to the concept of morphology, relating form to function and environmental adaptation. As well as this magnum opus, Goebel published more than 200 papers and books and edited the German botanical journal Flora from 1889. He was president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, general director of the Scientific Collections of the State, a foreign member of the Royal Society and other leading academies in Europe and America.
