Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius

Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was a German botanist and explorer, born in Erlangen in 1794, the son of the court apothecary. After a doctorate at Erlangen in 1814 he was sent to Brazil in 1817 by the King of Bavaria together with Johann Baptist von Spix, and between 1817 and 1820 they travelled some 10,000 km through southern and eastern provinces and up the Amazon to Tabatinga. From 1820 he kept the Munich botanic garden and herbarium, and from 1826 to 1864 he was professor of botany at the university in Munich. He published the Nova Genera et Species Plantarum Brasiliensium, the Historia naturalis palmarum describing every known palm genus, and in 1840 he became founding editor of the Flora Brasiliensis, finished in 1906 and describing almost 23,000 plants. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1837 and died in Munich in 1868.