Eduard Friedrich Poeppig

Eduard Friedrich Poeppig was a German botanist, zoologist and explorer, born in Plauen in Saxony in 1798. He studied medicine and natural history at the University of Leipzig and took a medical degree, after which the rector gave him a botanical mission to North and South America. He worked as a naturalist in Cuba and Pennsylvania, then in 1826 sailed for Valparaiso and spent several years exploring Chile, Peru and Brazil, an expedition that led to his two-volume account of travels in Chile, Peru and on the Amazon. He returned to Germany in 1832 with several hundred stuffed animals, ethnographic objects and more than seventeen thousand dried plants. At Leipzig he became associate professor, director of the zoological museum in 1834 and full professor in 1846, and he helped found a scientific museum there. He died in 1868.