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Eugenius Warming
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Everything about Eugenius Warming totally explained
Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming ( November 3, 1841 – April 2, 1924), known as Eugen Warming, was a Danish botanist and a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology. Warming wrote the first textbook ( 1895) on plant ecology, taught the first university course in ecology and gave the concept its meaning and content.
“ If one individual can be singled out to be honoured as the founder of ecology, Warming should gain precedence”.
Warming wrote a number of textbooks on botany, plant geography and ecology, which were translated to several languages and were immensely influential at their time and later. Most important were Plantesamfund and Haandbog i den systematiske Botanik.
Early life and family life
Warming was born on the small Wadden Sea island of Mandø as the only child of Jens Warming (1797-1844), parish minister, and Anna Marie von Bülow af Plüskow (1801-1863). After the early death of his father, he moved with his mother to her brother in Vejle in eastern Jutland.
He married Johanne Margrethe Jespersen (known as Hanne Warming; 1850-1922) on November 10, 1871. They had eight children: Marie (1872-1947) married C.V. Prytz, Jens Warming (1873-1939), who became a professor in economy and statistics at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural College, Fro (1875-1880), Povl (1877-1878), Svend Warming (1879-1982), engineer at Burmeister & Wain shipyard, Inge (1879-1893), Johannes (1882-1970), farmer, and Louise (1884-1964).
External link: Ancestors and descendents (External Link )
Education and career
He attended high school at Ribe Katedralskole and commenced 1859 studies of natural history at the University of Copenhagen, but left university for three-and-a-half year (1863-1866) to act as secretary for the Danish palaeontologist Peter Wilhelm Lund, who lived and worked in Lagoa Santa, Brazil. After his return to Europe, he studied for a year under K.F.P. Martius, K.W. Nägeli and Ludwig Radlkofer in Munich and, in 1871, under J.L. von Hanstein in Bonn. Later in the same year (1871), he defended his Dr.Phil. thesis in Copenhagen.
The professorship in botany at the University of Copenhagen became vacant with the death of A.S. Ørsted and Warming was the obvious candidate for a successor. However, he was passed over and the chair given to the older, but much less productive and original Ferdinand Didrichsen. Warming then became docent of botany at the University of Copenhagen, the polytechnic ( Polyteknisk Læreanstalt) and the Pharmaceutical College 1873-1882. He became professor in botany at Stockholms högskola (later Stockholm University) 1882- 1885. As the eldest professor, he was elected rector magnificus. In 1885, he became professor in botany at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Copenhagen Botanical Garden and held these positions until his retirement in December 31, 1910. He was rector magnificus of the University of Copenhagen 1907-1908.
He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters from 1878 to his death. As such, he served on the board of directors of the Carlsberg Foundation 1889- 1921 and, because a biologist, on the board of the Carlsberg Laboratory. He also served on the board of the Geological Survey of Denmark 1895- 1917.
Eugen Warming was a frequent visitor to foreign universities, for example a travel to Strasbourg and Paris in 1876 and another to Göttingen, Jena, Bonn, Strasbourg and Paris in 1880. He participated in several Scandinavian Scientist Conferences between 1868 and 1916 and in the similar German meeting in Breslau in 1874. He joined the International Botanical Congresses in Amsterdam 1877, in Vienna 1905 and in Brussels 1910 and was president of the ‘Association internationale des botanistes‘ (1913). He attended the Linnaeus celebration in Uppsala 1907 and the Darwin celebration in London 1908. He was honorary fellow of the Royal Society in London and honorary member of the Danish Botanical Society. He was a corresponding member of the botanical section of the French Academy of Sciences.
He was made Commander 1st Degree of the Order of the Dannebrog, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and the Brazilian Imperial Order of the Rose. He is buried in Assistants Cemetery in Copenhagen.
Expeditions
The book Plantesamfund was based on Warming’s lectures on plant geography at the University of Copenhagen. It gives an introduction to all major biomes of the world. Warming’s aim, and his major lasting impact on the development of ecology, was to explain how nature solved similar problems (drought, flooding, cold, salt, herbivory, etc.) in similar way, despite using very different ‘raw material’ (species of different origin) in different regions of the world. This was a remarkably modern view – completely different from the merely descriptive floristic plant geography prevailing during his time.
Warming, E. (1895) Plantesamfund - Grundtræk af den økologiske Plantegeografi. P.G. Philipsens Forlag, Kjøbenhavn. 335 pp.
The subtitle alludes to the title of the book Grundtræk af den almindelige Plantegeografi, published in 1822 (German edn 1823: Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Pflanzengeographie) by J.F. Schouw, co-founder of the scientific phytogeography.
Plantesamfund was translated to German in 1896 as
Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie - Eine Einführung in die Kenntnis der Pflanzenvereine by Emil Knoblauch. Berlin, Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1896. 412 pp. This edition, which was approved by Warming, rapidly ran out of print.
A second, unauthorized, edition was issued during 1902 by Paul Graebner, who put his own name after Warming’s on the book’s frontispiece, despite no changes to the contents. Warming now worked on plant adaptations in dunes and salt marshes, while Raunkiær studied the morphology of Danish plants, eventually leading him to his plant life-form scheme. Nevertheless, after Raunkiær had published his life-form scheme, Warming return to this topic in the work
Warming, E. (1908) Om planterigets livsformer [translatedtitle: On the life forms in the vegetable kingdom]. G.E.C. Gad, København.
Warming’s new scheme was less simple than Raunkiær's, taking other environmental factors than wintering into account, especially water/drought stress. Warming didn't approve of what he saw as over-simplification in the Raunkiær scheme.
Warmings last published work was a renewed attempt to put all plant (including bacteria and algae) life forms into a system.
Warming, E. (1923) Økologiens Grundformer – Udkast til en systematisk Ordning [translatedtitle: Fundamental ecological forms - draft for a system]. Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 8. Rk., vol. 4: 120-187.
Warmings published a number of treatises based on his expedition to Southwest Greenland in 1884. On of the most important ones is his observations of the vegetation of Greenland and the history of the flora:
Warming, E. (1887) Om Grønlands Vegetation [translatedtitle: On the vegetation of Greenland]. Meddelelser om Grønland 12: 1-223. A summary was published as:
Warming, E. (1888) Über Grönlands Vegetation. Englers Botanische Jahrbücher, 10. Following the publication of this paper, Warming entered a dispute with A.G. Nathorst over the history of the flora of Greenland.
Warming's collections of leaves, stems and flowers, made during the brief expedition, were examined in detail and the anatomy of a number of species described in a series of papers in Danish. Later, Warming distributed the material family-wise, now ameliorated with collectections made later expeditions and elsewhere in the Arctic, to students, who made further investigations and published the results in English:
Warming, E. ed. (1908-1921) The structure and biology of Arctic flowering plants. Meddelelser om Grønland vol. 36: 1-481 and 37: 1-507.
Warming, E. ed. (1901-1908) Botany of the Færöes - based upon Danish investigations, vol. I-III. Copenhagen and London.
Rosenvinge, L. Kolderup & Warning, E. (eds) (1912-1932) The Botany of Iceland, vol. 1-3. Copenhagen, J. Frimodt. Continued in vols 4-5 edited by Johannes Grøntved, Ove Paulsen and Thorvald Sørensen. Full text of Vol. 1 (part 1 and part 2) and Vol. 2 (part 1).
Vegetation of Denmark
Warming, E. 1904. Bidrag til Vadernes, Sandenes og Marskens Naturhistorie (with contributions of C. Wesenberg-Lund, E. Østrup &c). Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter - Naturvidenskabelig og Mathematisk Afdeling, 7. Rk., 2: 1-56.
Warming, E. 1906. Dansk Plantevækst. 1. Strandvegetationen. - Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. [beachvegetation]
Warming, E. 1909. Dansk Plantevækst. 2. Klitterne. - Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. [dunes]
Warming, E. 1917. Dansk Plantevækst. 3. Skovene. - Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag. [forests]
Warming’s influence
It was Eugenius Warming's Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie that must be considered as the starting point of self-conscious ecology. This book was the first to use physiological relations between plants and their environment, and in addition biotic interactions to explain the moulding of the assemblages that plant geographers had described and classified, and it would set up a research agenda for decades to come.
Despite the language barrier, Warming’s influence on the development of ecology is remarkable, not the least in Britain and the USA. The British ecologist Arthur Tansley was extremely influenced by reading ’Plantesamfund’ (or rather the 1896 German edition). Reading the book made him jump from anatomy to ecology. Similarly, Warming's book was decisive in forming the careers of North American naturalists like Henry Chandler Cowles. Cowles' now classic studies of Lake Michigan sand dune plant communities were directly inspired by Warming's studies of Danish dunes. Also Frederic Clements was much inspired by Warming when starting to working with succession, but more by Oscar Drude in formulating his concept of vegetational climax in his 1916 book.
A more unexpected avenue of influence went through the American sociologist Robert E. Park, who read Warming's Oecology of Plants and used the ideas of ecological succession as inspiration for a notion of succession in human communities - a human ecology.
Warming’s influence on later Scandinavian ecology was immense. Especially significant was his inspiration to Christen Raunkiær – his pupil and successor on the chair of botany at the University of Copenhagen. In addition, he'd a direct influence of Danish research, scientific and other, for a couple of decades. After his appointment to the professorship in Copenhagen, he gradually took over Japetus Steenstrups power base, most notably as one of three members of the board of the Carlsberg Foundation for 32 years. Thus, Warming had the upper hand in whom should be granted money and whom should not.
Warming and evolution
Warming was a firm believer in adaptation. However, he was a declared Lamarckist. In his popularizing book Nedstamningslæren (The theory of decendence; 1915), he reviewed the direct and indirect evidence for common decent of living organisms and for Darwinian natural selection as a process involved in speciation. His keen observations of how differently the same plant is grown under different circumstances (now known as phenotypic plasticity) led him to question the change of species by infinitesimally small steps as advocated by his contemporary Darwinists of the Biometry school, for example Karl Pearson. Warming summarized his view on the ways in which new species could may arise: 1) By inheritance of acquired characters; 2) By hybridization; 3) By natural selection, with the latter mechanism being the least important.
Warming, religion and politics
Warming was raised in a Christian protestant home and he continued to be religious throughout his life. He accepted the evolution by descent of living beings, but believed that laws governing planets’ orbits and other laws governing organic evolution were god-given. In his popular book Nedstamningslæren (translated title: Evolution by descent), he concludes the section on hypotheses about the origin of life writing that, no matter what hypothesis is considered, it just “defers the grand question: how did life first come into existence, »in the beginning«? … as if we human beings thereby obtained understanding and explanation for anything at all, or circumvented the almighty power that, incomprehensibly to our mind, must have created matter, force, time and infinite space. Science hasn't disproven the Bible that says: »In the beginning God created …«!”.
Politically, Warming was national-conservative, Scandinavist and anti-Prussian. Warming was able to visit his birth place only a few times in his life because Schleswig was conquered by Prussia and Austria in 1864 and (Northern Schleswig) returned to Denmark in 1920. Warming expressed support, in letters.
Miscellaneous
The Orchid genus Warmingia Rchb.f. and dozens of species (IPNI) has been named to his honour. Also Warming Land - a peninsula in northernmost Greenland.
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais has organized a series of 'Eugen Warming lectures in Evolutionary Ecology' since 1994.
Biographies and obituaries
Raunkiær, C. (1904) Biography in Dansk Biografisk Lexikon, vol. XVIII
Urban, Ignatius (1906) Vitae for Warming in Flora Brasiliensis, enumeratio plantarum in Brasilia hactenus detectarum :quas suis aliorumque botanicorum studiis descriptas et methodo naturali digestas partim icone illustratas /ediderunt Carolus Fridericus Philippus de Martius et Augustus Guilielmus Eichler ; iisque defunctis successor Ignatius Urban; Fasc. CXXX (ultimus) - VITAE ITINERAQUE COLLECTORUM BOTANICORUM Etc.
Obituary in Nature, 113, 683-684 (1924) by William G. Smith
Obituaries in Botanisk Tidsskrift, 39 (1924):
Christensen, C. (1924-26) Den danske botaniks historie, med tilhørende bibliografi. I. Den danske botaniks historie fra de ældste tider til 1912. II. Bibliografi.
Christensen, C. (1932) Eugenius Warming, pp. 156-160 in: Meisen, V. Prominent Danish Scientists through the Ages. University Library of Copenhagen 450th Anniversary. Levin & Munksgaard, Copenhagen.
Müller, D. (1980) Warming, Johannes Eugenius Bülow. In: Gillespie, C.G. (ed.) Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 16. New York, NY: Charles Scribner and Sons. ISBN 0684101149
Klein, Aldo Luiz (2000) Warming e o cerrado brasileiro um século depois. São Paulo, UNESP. 156 pp. ISBN 8571393540Further Information
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