Swiss botanist and assistant to Sir Hans Sloane in London who later worked as a botanist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. While in St. Petersburg Amman was in regular correspondence with Sloane and Carl Linnaeus, disseminating important information on the early botanical exploration of Russia.
Originally from Schaffhausen, he studied medicine at the University of Leiden but was always primarily a botanist. Studying under Herman Boerhaave he graduated in 1729. In 1730 the Scottish surgeon, William Houstoun, recommended Amman to Sloane who employed him as curator of his natural history collections. In this role Amman showed a visiting Gerhard Friedrich Müller around the Sloane collection, which resulted in an invitation for him to work in St. Petersburg as a professor. Amman was hesitant at first, but decided to make the move in 1733. He was perhaps encouraged to do so because of tensions between him and Sloane's other assistant, Cromwell Mortimer.
From his correspondence with Sloane, which Amman maintained throughout his life, it is possible to build a picture of his time in Russia. Initially Amman was pleasantly surprised by the appearance and living conditions in St. Petersburg, but soon grew frustrated at the internal disputes at the Academy of Sciences. He soon suffered from a recurring illness, but in 1838 his pleas for the creation of a physic garden at the Academy were granted and Amman became its first director. He received seeds from Samara and the river Lena as well as from the East and West Indies and North America from Sloane, which he planted there. His marriage in 1739 to Anna Elizabeth Schumacher (whose father was at the centre of controversies within the Academy) seems to have raised his spirits, but she passed away very soon after the wedding. By 1741 he was deeply unhappy and in ailing health, and he died in December that year, aged just 34.
Amman's great legacy is his correspondence with Sloane about the plants collected throughout the Russian Federation by members of the Kamchatka and Orenburg Expeditions. Cultivating the seeds collected on these expeditions in the physic garden, he made herbarium specimens from the adult plants. As well as gathering together the specimens from these expeditions, Amman made his own collections from the St. Petersburg region, although he never travelled far from the city. He sent a lot of these specimens to Sloane, Linnaeus and Jacob Dillenius at Oxford University, and therefore many of the earliest Siberian plant specimens are now housed in England. Amman was also responsible for publishing a flora of the Russian Empire, the Stirpium Rariorum in Imperio Rutheno Sponte Provenientium Icones et Descriptiones (1739) which contains the descriptions of 285 plants. The genus Ammannia L. (a member of the Lythraceae family from Jamaica) was originally named for him by Houstoun as Ammania and was adopted by Linnaeus in his sexual system who changed its spelling.
Sources:
W.J. Bryce, 2008, A Botanist's Paradise: The Establishment of Scientific Botany in Russia in the Eighteenth Century
D. Margócsy, 2010, "Refer to folio and number: Encyclopedias, the Exchange of Curiosities, and Practices of Identification before Linnaeus", Journal of the History of Ideas, 71(1):63-89
M. Rowell, 1980, "Linnaeus and Botanists in Eighteenth-Century Russia", Taxon, 29(1): 15-26
T.A. Sprague, 1928, "The Correct Spelling of Certain Generic Names: III", Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information (Royal Gardens, Kew), 1928(9): 337-365.
