Friedrich Schmidt

Carl Friedrich Schmidt, known on the Wollaston Medal roster as Friedrich Schmidt and in Russian sources as Fyodor Bogdanovich Schmidt, was a Baltic German geologist and botanist born January 27, 1832, in Kaisma, Livonia, who died November 21, 1908, in Saint Petersburg, and who is acknowledged as the founder of Estonian geology, researching Estonian oil shale and identifying and naming the mineral kukersite after the town of Kuckers, and investigating the stratigraphy and fauna of Lower Palaeozoic rocks in Estonia and neighboring regions. He was the first European to discover the Sakhalin fir on Sakhalin island, in 1866, became an academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1885, and received the Wollaston Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1902; the Schmidt Peninsula on Sakhalin is named in his honor and he used the author abbreviation F.Schmidt in botanical citations.