Wilhelm Hemprich

Wilhelm Friedrich Hemprich was a German naturalist and explorer, born in Glatz in Prussian Silesia on 24 June 1796. He studied medicine at Breslau and Berlin, where he befriended Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, lectured on comparative physiology and wrote a compendium of natural history in 1820. That year he and Ehrenberg were invited, under the sponsorship of the Berlin Academy, to join an expedition to Egypt as naturalists. They spent years studying the Nile valley as far as Dongola, the marine life of the Red Sea around Sinai, and the mountains of Lebanon. Hemprich died of fever at Massawa in 1825. The collections, some 46,000 plant specimens and 34,000 animal specimens including many new species, went to the Berlin zoological museum, and Ehrenberg published the results in 1828.