Note 75 — Chapter III · Examination of the Matured Framework of Cell-membrane in Plants. 1800-1840.

Heinrich Friedrich Link was born at Hildesheim in 1767, and became Doctor of Medicine of Göttingen in 1788. In 1792 he became Professor of Zoology, Botany, and Chemistry in Rostock, Professor of Botany in 1811 in Breslau, and in 1815 in Berlin, where he died in 1851. He was a clever man of very varied accomplishment, but not a very accurate observer of details, and was held in estimation by many chiefly as a good teacher and philosophic author of popular works on natural science. He was one of the few German botanists in the early part of the present century who aimed at a general knowledge of plants, and combined anatomical and physiological enquiries with solid researches in systematic botany. Of his many treatises on all branches of botanical science, zoology, physics, chemistry, and other subjects, his Göttingen prize essay must be considered to have contributed most to the advancement of science. Von Martius somewhat overrates his scientific importance in his ‘Denkrede auf H. F. Link’ in the ‘Gelehrte Anzeigen,’ München (1851), 58-69.