Biography

German botanist whose research focused on plant physiology and adaptation. Born in Strasbourg, Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper (known as Wilhelm) came from a family of natural historians. His father, Wilhelm Philipp Schimper (1808-1880), was director of the natural history museum in Strasbourg and taught geology, while two of his father's cousins were botanists, as was Schimper's mother, who was naturally enthusiastic about her son's choice of career. He attended the University of Strasbourg from 1874-1878, receiving his doctorate for work carried out under Anton de Bary and the mineralogist P. Groth in which he looked at protein crystalloids in plants.

He stayed on at the university, publishing an important paper on the growth of starch grains in plants in 1880. In the same year, Schimper's father died. The younger Schimper was the favourite for taking over as head of the Strasbourg Natural History Museum, but many interested parties, including De Bary, baulked at the election of such a young man (Schimper was but 24) and the appointment was withdrawn. Embarrassed, Schimper left the city and worked in a botanic garden in Lyon for some time. After a brief sojourn back in Strasbourg he went on to join the new John Hopkins University in Baltimore, U.S.A, as a fellow, though he resigned just over a year later in objection to the use of cats in experiments. While he was on that side of the Atlantic he did, however, make some useful excursions, observing tropical vegetation in Florida and the West Indies for the first time. When he returned to Germany in 1882 the focus of his research had turned to plant adaptation. This he carried out at the University of Bonn, where he was employed from 1882-1898, latterly as assistant professor.

His interest in tropical epiphytic vegetation had been so piqued by his first trip to the Americas that he was keen to return to carry out more studies. He was soon granted his wish, accompanying Bonn's Friedrich Johow on an eight-month voyage round Barbados, Trinidad, Dominica and Venezuela. In the latter part of 1886 he sailed again, visiting Brazil with one of his associates from Bonn, Heinrich Schenck. The pair stayed with Fritz Müller, an early proponent of Darwinism, who resided in the German colony of Blumenau on the country's south-eastern coast.

Müller set Schimper to work on one of his pet projects investigating the symbiotic relationship between ants and Cecropia trees. A particular species of ant, Azteca instabilis, was always found to inhabit stem cavities in the imbaúba tree (Cecropia adenopis Mart. Ex Miq.). This presence was seen to ward off leaf-cutting ants, which would otherwise quickly strip the tree's foliage down to the mid-rib. Schimper found that while the stem cavities were not a special adaptation to provide a home for the protective Azteca ants, entrances in the form of special depressions that allow the ants to find their way in, probably were. (Not everyone agreed with him, for example the entomologist William Morton Wheeler published a firm objection to the theory in 1910.)

Schimper's work on epiphytes and the Cecropia trees and ants appeared as part of his series Botanische Mittheilungen aus den Tropen, to which Schenck contributed, too. Also in the series were published some of the findings from Schimper's fourth excursion to the tropics, a study of the coastal vegetation of Indo-Malaysia. This trip, in 1889-1890, saw Schimper visit Ceylon and Java, being delayed between the two when he was mistaken for an opium smuggler and detained in Batavia.

Turning down the chair in botany at the University of Marburg in 1891 due to poor health, Schimper finally obtained a professorship in 1898, at Basel, but his tenure was cut short by his premature death in 1901. In the year of his appointment he published his best known work, Pflanzengeographie auf physiologischer Grundlage (Plant Geography upon a Physiological Basis), and embarked on a voyage round Africa and to the Antarctic with the deep sea expedition of the Valdivia. It was while on board ship off the coast of Africa that he contracted malaria. Just over two years later, sick with diabetes compounded by this disease, he died. British botanist Percy Groom credited Schimper with having founded the science of plant ecology thanks to his work on plant geography, but Schimper never really studied plant communities, only the relationship of individual plants to their environment. Nevertheless, Schimper left several important botanical works, though unfortunately many of his herbarium collections were lost; along with Berlin, the Bonn herbarium was mostly destroyed in 1944, including Schimper's specimens held there. His collections are, however, represented elsewhere, particularly in Stuttgart.

Sources:
E. Cittadino, Nature as the laboratory: Darwinian plant ecology in the German Empire, 1880-1900: 97-115, 146-147
P. Groom, 1901, "Prof. A.F.W. Schimper", Nature, 64: 551-552
P. Groom, "A.F.W. Schimper: An Appreciation", in A.F.W. Schimper (translated by W.R. Fisher), 1903, Plant Geography: x-xvii
H. Schenck, 1902, "Wilhelm Schimper", Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 17: 36-39
H. Schenck, 1903, "A.F. Wilhelm Schimper", Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft, 19: (57)-(70).