Note 39 — Chapter III · Development of the Natural System under the Influence of the Dogma of the Constancy of Species. 1759-1850.

Stephen Ladislaus Endlicher was born at Pressburg in 1805, and abandoning the study of theology became Scriptor in the Imperial Library at Vienna in 1828, and in 1836 Custos of the botanical department of the Imperial Collection of Natural History. Having graduated at the University in 1840, he became Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanic Garden. His library and herbarium, valued at 24,000 thalers, he presented to the State, and with his private means founded the Annalen des Wiener-Museums, purchased botanical collections and expensive botanical books, and published his own works and works of other writers. His official salary was small, and having exhausted his resources in these various expenses, he put an end to his own life in March 1849. Endlicher was not only one of the most eminent systematists of his day, but a philologist also, and a good linguist. He wrote among other things a Chinese grammar. See ‘Linnaea,’ vol. xxxiii (1864 and 1865), p. 583.