Michael Joseph François Scheidweiler

1

Michael Joseph François Scheidweiler (1 August 1799 – 24 September 1861) was a German-born professor of botany and taxonomist, whose main area of interest was the Cactaceae. From a collection by Henri Guillaume Galeotti, he first described Ariocarpus retusus, type species of the genus in 1838 in Brussels.

Life

Scheidweiler was born in Cologne on 1 August 1799 and after studying humanities in Siegburg he qualified as a pharmacist in Cologne. He returned to Siegburg for a year before embarking on travels through much of Germany and Switzerland to acquire botanical knowledge, and then worked as a pharmacist and industrial chemist in Cologne and Aachen, where he married. In 1830 he settled in Belgium, first in Liège, later in Brussels, where he lectured on natural history at the Établissement Géographique de Bruxelles that Philippe Vandermaelen had established in 1830 and, from its foundation in 1836, at the State School of Veterinary Medicine and Agriculture (now the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Liège). In 1850 he launched the short-lived journal L'agriculteur belge et étranger. In 1851 he was appointed instructor at the State School of Horticulture in Gentbrugge that Louis van Houtte had founded in 1849. In 1854, the genus Scheidweileria (family Begoniaceae) was named in his honor by Johann Friedrich Klotzsch. He died in Ghent on 24 September 1861.

Publications

Author abbreviation

Scheidweiler is denoted by the author abbreviation ''' Scheidw. ''' when citing a botanical name.

This article is derived from Wikipedia and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. View the original article.

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Bliptext is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.

Edit article