Johann Georg Gmelin

Johann Georg Gmelin (1709 to 1755) was a German naturalist, botanist and geographer. Born in Tübingen, the son of a professor at the University of Tübingen, he was a gifted child who began attending university lectures at fourteen and graduated in medicine at eighteen in 1727. He went to St Petersburg and obtained a fellowship at the Academy of Sciences in 1728, lectured at the university from 1730 and the next year was appointed professor of chemistry and natural history. He was one of three professors chosen for Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition of 1733 to 1743, travelled through the Urals and western Siberia, described the Yenisey river as a boundary between Europe and Asia and was the first to measure that the Caspian Sea lies below the level of the Mediterranean. A fire at Yakutsk in 1736 destroyed his collections and notes, and he re-collected specimens the following summer. His Flora Sibirica, published from 1747 to 1769, describes 1178 species, 294 of them illustrated, and he told the story of the journey in his Reise durch Sibirien. He returned to the University of Tübingen in 1747.