Scientist of the Day - Eugenius Warming
Portrait of Eugenius Warming in his twenties, carte de visite, Royal Library, Copenhagen (Wikimedia commons)
Eugenius Warming, a Danish botanist, died Apr. 2, 1924, at the age of 82. Warming was one of the founders of the modern science of ecology. The word "ecology" had been coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, but Haeckel made no attempt to establish the field. It was Warming, in an 1895 Danish botanical textbook called Plantesamfund (Plant Communities), who defined the nature of the discipline. He pointed out that organisms, plant and animal, live in highly developed communities, the tenure of which depends on such things as temperature, rainfall, soil constitution, elevation, and countless other factors. He noted that communities change over time, moving toward what he called "climax" communities, which will remain dominant until conditions change. But he also advised that conditions will change, through wildfire, or floods, or man-made alterations, and that such changes are often irreversible, so that a forest turned into grassland will seldom revert to a forest community again.
Title page, Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie, by Eugenius Warming, 1896 (Linda Hall Library)
Warming's book was written in Danish, and translated into German in 1896 (second image). The German translation was very influential, which was a good thing, since the book was not published in an English version until 1909, when it was titled Oecology of Plants. Long before it appeared, American botanists were abuzz with discussions of plant communities, and the word “oecology” was everywhere. As Donald Worster pointed out in his still essential book, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977), Warming was so influential because he provided a complete vocabulary for the new science, such as the idea of a “climax community,” and introduced terms like hydrophyte and xerophyte to describe plants that like, or can do without, water. Warming made it easier to be an ecologist and discuss ecological findings, which is why he usually gets the nod over Haeckel or Andreas Schimper as being the father of ecology.
Portrait of Eugenius Warming, age 39, photograph, 1880 (Wikimedia commons)
We have the first German edition of Warming’s book in our collections, and the second English edition, but we need to find and acquire the first Danish and the first English editions. From our 1925 English edition, we show a paragraph from the introduction where he explains “Oecological plant-geography” (fifth image). This follows a paragraph setting out the concerns of the other kind of plant-geography, which he calls “floristic,” and which deals with the traditional aims of botanists, the mapping of species and genera and the limits of their distribution, and which, he advises, will not be discussed in his book.
Title page, Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant-Communities, by Eugenius Warming, 1909 (1925) (Linda Hall Library)
Paragraph in introduction defining “Oecological Plant-geography,” Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant-Communities, by Eugenius Warming, 1909 (1925) (Linda Hall Library)
There is a paucity of portraits of Warming, all, for some reason, small photographs. Normally, in these posts, I like to find photos of the young scientist, because most important scientific work is done by the young. We include one photo of young Warming here (first image) and one of him at about age 40 (third image). But his ecological manifesto, Plantesamfund, was published when he was 54 years old. So in this case, a photo of the older scientist is especially appropriate (sixth image).
Portrait of Eugenius Warming, taken 5 years after the publication of his Plantesamfund, photograph, 1900 (Wikimedia commons)
Finally, we will point out that Warming engaged in some botanical traveling, but mostly to places in or not far from Scandinavia. If he had been more of a world traveler, he might have earned the nickname, Global Warming. Fortunately, he wasn’t, and he didn’t.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
