Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten

Gustav Karl Wilhelm Hermann Karsten (6 November 1817 to 10 July 1908) was a German botanist and geologist, born in Stralsund and died in Zoppot. Following the example of Alexander von Humboldt, he travelled from 1844 to 1856 in the northern part of South America, in Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia. From 1856 to 1868 he was a professor at the agricultural college in Berlin, and afterwards professor of plant physiology at the University of Vienna from 1868 to 1872. In 1881, at the suggestion of David Friedrich Weinland, he became convinced of the correctness of Otto Hahn's organic theory of the chondrites and wrote the essay Die Meteorite und ihre Organismen declaring his support for it. As a taxonomist he was the binomial author of many botanical species.