Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck

Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck was a German botanist, physician, zoologist and natural philosopher, born in 1776 at Schloss Reichenberg in the Odenwald. He took his degree in natural history and medicine at Jena in 1800, practised as a physician and then returned to academic life, becoming professor of botany at Erlangen in 1817, professor of natural history at Bonn, where he founded the university botanical garden, and from 1831 professor of botany at Breslau. He described about 7,000 plant species, many of them in the Acanthaceae and Lauraceae, and wrote widely on fungi and on zoology. From 1818 until his death he was president of the Leopoldina academy, and he admitted Charles Darwin to it. Politically active in the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, he lost his chair and pension in 1851 and died in Breslau in 1858.