KUNTH, CARL SIGISMUND

(b. Leipzig, Germany, 18 June 1788; d. Berlin, Germany, 22 March 1850)

botany.

Kunth was the son of a lecturer in English at Leipzig University and was educated at the Leipziger Rathsschule. In 1806 he was sent to Berlin to stay with his uncle Gotlob Christian Kunth, who had been tutor of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt. The administrative post that Kunth was given at the Seehandlungs–Institut left him sufficient time to study botany at the University of Berlin under Carl Ludwig von Willdenow. Through his uncle Kunth became acquainted with Alexander von Humboldt, who was living in Paris during publication of the account of his South and Central American expedition and who invited Kunth to stay with him and publish the botanical results. Just before leaving Berlin, Kunth published his first Flora berolinensis (1813), essentially a purely floristic inventory. While he was in Paris, however, his botanical interest changed from floristics to analytical systematics.

The Paris group of botanists, which included René Desfontaines, A. L. de Jussieu, and Louis Claude Marie Richard, was involved in developing a more broadly based systematics, working toward a natural system of classification that could more effectively deal with the influx of the many new forms from tropical regions than could the old Linnaean system. Rather than accept the strict Linnaean hierarchy of characteristics of a few characters thought to be “essential,” they took as a base a broad spectrum of morphological characters derived from the entire plant rather than from just the gross morphology of the flower. Kunth, when dealing with the 3,600 new species brought home by Humboldt and Bonpland, contributed significantly to this development by giving special attention to a minute analysis of floral structures and to a better understanding of the significance of vegetative characteristics.

The sumptuous way in which Humboldt presented the results of his expeditions enabled Kunth to publish his comprehensive analytical studies in great detail. He wrote the text for, and prepared most analytical drawings of the plates of, the seven volumes of the Nova genera et species plantarum (1815–1823), one of the sections of Humboldt and Bonpland’s Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799… 1804. These volumes were followed by Mimoses et autres plantes légumineuses du Nouveatt Continent (1819[ - 1824]), Révision des graminées (1829[–1834]), and Synopsis plantarum (1822–1825). These major works, describing in great detail and illustrating with beautiful plates thousands of taxa of New World plants, were written during nearly seventeen years of research in Paris, and drew upon not only the collections made by Kunth’s patrons but also the other public and private herbaria that made Paris the world’s capital of systematic botany during this period.

In 1829 Kunth became professor at the University of Berlin and head of the Berlin botanical garden. During his later years he published textbooks and works of taxonomic synthesis, such as Enumeratio plantarum (1833–1850), thus adding significantly to his impressive output. During his last years Kunth’s work was impaired by bad health.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Kunth’s contributions to Humboldt and Bonpland’s Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799 … 1804. pt. 6, Botanique, are sec. 2, Monographic des mélastomacécs (Paris, 1816-1823) – part of Melastomue. I, and the major part of Rhexiae, II; sec. 3, Nova genera el species plantarum, 7 vols. (Paris, 1815 – 1823[– 1825] facs. repr. Weinheim, 1963; Amsterdam, 1974) – the text and the analytical parts of the plates; sec. 4, Mimoses et autres plantes légumineuses du Nouveiut Continent (Paris, 1819[ - 1824]); sec. 5, Synopsis plantarum, 4 vols. (Paris, 1822– 1825 [1826]); sec. 6, Révision des gramtinees) text and atlas (Paris 1829[– 1834]), reiss. as Distribution méthodique de la famille des graminées (Paris, 1835-1837). Also published in Paris were Malvaceae, Büttneriaceae, Tiliaceae (1822) and Terebiuhacearum genera (1824).

Other books are Flora berolinensis (Berlin, 1813); Handbuch der Botanik (Berlin, 1831); Enumeratio plantarum, 5 vols, and supp. (Stuttgart — Tübingen, 1833–1850); and Lehrbuch der Botanik (Berlin, 1847). Flora berolinensis, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1832), is a different work from the book with the same title of 1813.

For Kunth’s many articles in scientific journals and periodicals, see Annales des sciences naturelles (Botanique), 3rd ser., 14 (1850), 95–106; and Stearn (see below), 149–151.

II. Secondary Literature. There are two major contemporary sources of information: A. de Jussieu, Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Charles Sigismund Kunth (Paris, 1850), also in Annales des sciences naturelees(BGotanique), 3rd ser., 14 (1850), 76–106; and A. von Humboldt, Beilage zum preussischen Staats-Anzeiger, no. 128 (611) (9 May 1851), repr. in Botanische Zeitung, 9 (1851), 427–432, and in W. T. Stearn, Humboldt, Bonpland, Kunth and Tropical American Botany (Lehre, 1968), 143–148. For bibliographical details of Kunth’s works, see F. A. Stafleu, Taxonomic Literature (Utrecht, 1967), 247–250.

Frans A. Stafleu