Rudolf Jakob Camerarius

Rudolf Jakob Camerarius
Rudolf Jakob Camerarius (1665-1721)
Born	February 12, 1665 Tübingen, Holy Roman Empire
Died	September 11, 1721 Tübingen, Holy Roman Empire
Nationality	German
Fields	Botanist and physician
Doctoral advisor	Elias Rudolph Camerarius Sr. Georg Balthasar Metzger
Doctoral students	Johann Andreas Planer
Notes
He is the son of Elias Rudolph Camerarius Sr.

Rudolf Jakob Camerarius or Camerer (February 12, 1665 – September 11, 1721) was a German botanist and physician.

Life

Camerarius was born at Tübingen, and became professor of medicine and director of the botanical gardens at Tübingen in 1687. He is chiefly known for his investigations on the reproductive organs of plants (De sexu plantarum epistola (1694)).

While other botanists, such as John Ray and Nehemiah Grew, had observed that plants seemed to have sex in some form, and guessed that pollen was the male fertilizing agent, it was Camerarius who did experimental work. In studying the mulberry, he determined that female plants not near to male (staminate) plants produced fruit but with no seeds. Mercurialis and spinach plants fared likewise. With the castor oil plant (Ricinus) and with maize he cut off the staminate flowers (the "tassels" of maize), and likewise observed that no seeds formed. His results were reported in the form of a letter (the epistola), and attracted immediate attention, subsequent workers extending his results from the monoecious plants he had studied to dioecious ones as well.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 
• Duane Isely, One hundred and one botanists (Iowa State University Press, 1994), pp. 74–76

External links

Media related to at Wikimedia Commons

• Rudolf Jakob Camerarius at the Mathematics Genealogy Project