Joseph Gaertner

Joseph Gaertner was a German botanist, born in Calw in 1732, best known for his work on seeds, De Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum, issued between 1788 and 1792. He studied at Göttingen under Albrecht von Haller, was professor of anatomy at Tübingen in 1760 and was appointed professor of botany at St Petersburg in 1768, but returned to Calw in 1770. Primarily a naturalist who also worked on physics and zoology, he travelled widely to meet other naturalists. He experimented with back crosses to convert one species into another, and his observations of dominance of traits and variation in later generations anticipated what Mendel later explained. His seed book, with more than a thousand minutely described species and 180 copper plate engravings, opened a new era in plant morphology, and the plant genus Gaertnera is named after him.