German businessman, world-traveller, and botanist. Otto Kuntze created a furore in the late nineteenth-century by proposing changes to approximately 30,000 names of plants. His revisions provoked the botanical establishment into resolving many outstanding problems in nomenclature.

Kuntze was educated in his hometown, Leipzig, until the age of 14. His interest in botany, awakened at school by the natural history instructor, Carl Otto Bulnheim, became more intense when he moved to Berlin at 20 to work as a clerk. His spare time was dedicated to plant collecting around Berlin, often in the company of botanists Alexander Braun and Paul Ascherson, and further afield on his travels in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In 1867 he published a pocket flora of the vicinity of Leipzig and a revision of the German brambles (Rubus), attended the International Botanical Congress in Paris, and ended the year with a study trip through Italy and part of France. He left Berlin the following year to set up a factory for volatile oils and essences in Leipzig. The business proved so successful that within five years he had made a sufficient fortune to spend the remainder of his life on travel and study.

On his first around-the-world journey in 1874, Kuntze visited the West Indies (Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad), Central and South America (Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica), the United States, Japan, China, southeastern Asia, India, Aden, and Egypt. He brought back about 7,700 plant specimens for his personal herbarium, and an extensive ethnological collection, which he gave to the Völkersmuseum in Leipzig. Up until now, Kuntze had been largely self-educated in the natural sciences. On his return to Germany, aged 33, he embarked upon a belated university training, studying botany at Leipzig and Berlin, and earning a PhD from Freiburg im Bresgau in June 1878 for his dissertation on Cinchona, a genus that had interested him ever since his visits to plantations in Indonesia and India. A series of publications followed in quick succession: in 1879 a second treatment of Rubus, mainly non-German this time, which he used to illustrate the proper method for describing species; in 1881 an account of his world travels, Reise um die Erde; and in 1883, Phytogeogenesis, a treatise on the origin of plant life. Then, for six years, he spent almost all his time organising and describing his botanical collections, interrupted only by short trips to eastern Asiatic Russia (1886), Hungary and Austria (summer 1887) and the Canary Islands (winter 1887-1888). From 1888-1890, he was at Kew pursuing his researches.

In 1891 the completed work Revisio generum plantarum appeared in two volumes. It was no mere list of plants collected, with descriptions of novelties. Instead, acting in response to the chaos he considered to have been unleashed by the rulings on botanical nomenclature at the International Botanical Congress in Paris in 1867, Kuntze had revised the names of virtually all known flowering plants, much to the consternation of taxonomists.

A week after its publication, Kuntze sailed for South America and spent the next year, 1892, collecting in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and southern Brazil. He returned to Berlin in 1893 to face the reviews and criticisms of his book and prepare responses. In 1894 he travelled in southern Africa, visiting Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal, and stopping in Mozambique and at Zanzibar on his return journey via Suez. In the winter of 1895-1896, he moved to a villa in San Remo, Italy. The third volume of the Revisio, which appeared in 1898 and was mainly concerned with addressing his critics and gaining support for his reforms, included a report upon the plants collected on his second visit to South America and on his African trip. It was followed by numerous polemical pamphlets, in which he did not always refrain from acrimony and personal attacks against his critics. In 1904 he made a second journey around the world, but in the reverse direction and by a more southerly route than before, stopping in Sri Lanka, New South Wales, Tasmania, New Zealand, Samoa, Hawaii, and the United States, and returning to Europe via New York. His last substantial botanical publication (Kuntze also published on geological, statistical, and legal subjects) was a collaboration with T.E. van Post of Upsala, Sweden, entitled Lexicon generum phanerogamarum. His last gesture came as a delegate at the International Botanical Congress held in Vienna in 1905, when he stood up at one of the sessions on nomenclature to denounce the organisation's authority to legislate on such matters. After this, his health declined and he died in January 1907. It was only in 1930 when the International Botanical Congress met at Cambridge that the last taxonomic issues raised by Kuntze were finally settled. Andrew Carnegie bought Kuntze's herbarium for the New York Botanical Garden, which in turn gave the European specimens to Charleston Museum in South Carolina.

Sources:
J.H. Barnhart, 1913, "Otto Kuntze", Bulletin of the Charleston Museum 9(8): 65-68
F.A. Stafleu, 1978, "Kuntze, Carl Oernst Otto", Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 15: 268-269
T.A. Zanoni, 1980, "Otto Kuntze, Botanist. I. Biography, Bibliography and Travels", Brittonia, 32(4): 551-571.