Writen by Maria Margaret Lopes1 and Irina Podgorny2, the article “Between seas and continents: aspects of the scientific career of Hermann von Ihering, 1850-1930” follows the trajectory of the German zoologist and paleontologist. It describes his training in zoology in Germany and Naples, his international activities based in Brazil, and his return to Germany. It deals with aspects of the formulation of his theories on land bridges. Von Ihering has also published a book on the history of the Atlantic Ocean.
Among other research topics, Hermann von Ihering has dedicated himself to the formulation of a land bridges theory. According to his theory, expounded in the early twentieth century, during the Secondary and also at the beginning of the Tertiary, the organic life of Ethiopia possessed a great kinship with that of Brazil. The Atlantic Oceans did not exist at that time and from this emerged the theory of Archhelenis, a land bridge that then linked both regions.
Hermann Friedrich Albrecht von Ihering was born on October 9, 1850 in Kiel, and died on February 24, 1930 in Büdingen, Germany. He studied medicine from 1868 to 1873 in Berlin. Von Ihering’s doctorate in Zoology about the ontogeny of Cyclas (fresh water mollusks), which he defended at the Unsiversity of Göttingen, was published in Leipzig in 1876.
He moved to Brazil in 1880, aged 30, after his marriage to Anna Maria Clarz Belzer Wolf, a widow with a 10-year-old son. The zoologist was the director of Paulista Museum (Museu Paulista) in São Paulo from 1894 to 1916 and therefore a legitimate member of the scientific community. In his works from the 1890s, Ihering strongly refuted the conceptions put forward by Alfred Russel Wallace about the permanence of the great oceanic basins. Looking back on his half century of scientific work, Ihering himself considered his first ten years of academic life as having been dedicated primarily to the morphology and phylogeny of mollusks. These studies were followed by forty years devoted to the development of science in Brazil.
Read the full article: “Between seas and continents: aspects of the scientific career of Hermann von Ihering, 1850-1930.”
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