Hugo von Mohl

Hugo von Mohl (8 April 1805 to 1 April 1872) was a German botanist from Stuttgart, the son of the Württemberg statesman Benjamin Ferdinand von Mohl. He entered the University of Tübingen in 1823, graduated with distinction in medicine and went to Munich, where a distinguished circle of botanists helped decide his career. From 1828 he carried out the anatomical investigations that continued until his death, and in 1832 he became professor of botany at Tübingen, a post he never left. He was the first person to use the word protoplasm for the part of a cell inside the cell wall, and he first described the behaviour of protoplasm in cell division, which he observed in 1835 in the green alga Cladophora glomerata. His work on the cell wall and on the structure of palms, cycads and tree ferns laid foundations for later knowledge, and his treatise Die vegetabilische Zelle (1851) gathered the theory of cell formation into one volume. He was elected a foreign fellow of the Royal Society in 1868.