Eugenius Warming

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 10 November 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 University, 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).[4] External link: Ancestors and descendents[5]

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, Carl 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 Doctor of Philosophy thesis at 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.[6] 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 on 31 December 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, e.g. 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, was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1885 and honorary member of the Danish Botanical Society. He was a corresponding member of the botanical section of the French Academy of Sciences.[7] 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.

• 1863-1866: Brasil, Lagoa Santa
• 1884 Greenland (Fylla expedition - view images on arktiskebilleder.dk[8][9][10]
• 1885: Norway, Finnmark
• 1887: Norway, Dovre
• 1891-1892: Venezuela, Trinidad and the Danish West Indies
• 1895: Faroe Islands

In addition, shorter visits to the Alps and other proximate destinations.

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.[1]

• Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie - Eine Einführung in die Kenntnis der Pflanzenvereine];[11] "Nach der neuesten Litteratur Vervollständigt bei Paul Graebner"; Berlin, Gebrüder Borntraeger.

This edition was expanded in third and fourth editions:

• Warming, E. & Graebner, P. (1918) Eug. Warming's Lehrbuch der ökologischen Pflanzengeographie, 3 ed. Berlin, Gebrüder Borntrager. Fourth edn (1933) - 1158 pp.

A Polish translation of ’Plantesamfund’ (from Knoblauch's German translation) appeared in 1900:

• Warming, E. (1900) Zbiorowiska Roślinne zarys ekologicznej geografii roślin by Edward Strumpf and Jósef Trzebiński. Warszawa, 1900. 451 pp.

Two independent Russian (Moscow and St. Petersburg) editions appeared in 1901 and 1903

• Вармингъ, Е. (1901) Ойкологическая географія растеній – Введеніе въ изученіе растительныхъ сообществъ by M. Golenkin and W. Arnol'di. Moskva, 542 pp.[12]
• Вармингъ, Е. (1903) Распредъленіе растений въ зависимости отъ внъшнихъ условій—Экологическая географія растеній by A. G. Henkel' and with a treatise of the vegetation of Russia by G. I. Tanfil'ev. St. Petersburg, 474 pp.

An extended and translated edition in English first appeared in 1909:

• Warming, E. with M. Vahl (1909) Oecology of Plants—an introduction to the study of plant-communities[13] by P. Groom and I. B. Balfour. Clarendon Press, Oxford. 422 pp. (2nd edn 1925).

The German ecologist A. F. W. Schimper published Pflanzengeographie auf physiologisher Grundlage in 1898.

This work not only covered much of the same ground as Warming did in 1895 and 1896 but in fact also leaned heavily on Warming’s research. Schimper (1898) quoted extensively from more than 15 of Warming’s works and even reproduced Warming’s figures. Yet nowhere did Schimper acknowledge his profound debt to Warming, neither in the list of picture credits, nor in the acknowledgements section of the Vorwort, nor in his list of major sources, and not even in a footnote! ... Although replete with Warming’s data, it contains few ideas and did not advance ecology beyond what Warming had done earlier.[1]

Warming was a skillful and dedicated pedagogue, whose presentation of the subject was useful far beyond his lecture theatre in Copenhagen. He wrote a number of botany textbooks for the university level, as well as school books.

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.[22]

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.[1] Tansley used the book as textbook in a university course as early as 1899.[23][24] Similarly, Warming's book was decisive in forming the careers of North American naturalists like Henry Chandler Cowles.[25] Cowles' now classic studies of Lake Michigan sand dune plant communities were directly inspired by Warming's studies of Danish dunes.[26] 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.[27]

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 had a direct influence on 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 who should be granted money and who should not.

Warming was a firm believer in adaptation. However, he was a declared Lamarckist. In his popularizing book Nedstamningslæren (The theory of descendence; 1915),[28] he reviewed the direct and indirect evidence for common descent 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, e.g. 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 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 has not disproven the Bible that says: »In the beginning God created …«!”.[28] Warming shared this view with many prominent contemporary naturalists, e.g. Alfred Russel Wallace.[29]

Politically, Warming was national-conservative, Scandinavist and anti-Prussian. Warming was able to visit his birthplace 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,[4] for France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. He made financial contributions to a secret fund that should support Danish-minded Schleswigian farmers in buying farms and prevent Germanization of Northern Schleswig. In a letter of 1898 to his son Jens, he regrets that the Højre – the conservative party – would lose an upcoming election and expresses concern that anarchy and socialism will eventually rule.[30]

The Orchid genus Warmingia Rchb.f. and dozens of vascular plant species (IPN])[31] has been named to his honour. The same is the case for a number of fungi, e.g. the smut fungus Microbotryum warmingii (Rostr.) Vánky and the gall fungus Arcticomyces warmingii (Rostr.) Savile. Warming Land - a peninsula in northernmost Greenland is named for him.

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais has organized a series of 'Eugen Warming lectures in Evolutionary Ecology' since 1994.

• History of ecology

• 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):
  • L. K. Rosenvinge: Eug. Warming og Dansk Botanisk Forening, pp. 1–6
  • Carl Christensen: Eug. Warming, en Levnedsbeskrivelse, pp. 7–30
  • C. H. Ostenfeld: Warmings almindelige botaniske Virksomhed, pp. 31–38
  • A. Mentz: Warming som plantegeografisk Forsker, pp. 39–44
  • Charles Flahault, O. Juel, C. Schröter and A.G. Tansley: Eug. Warming in memoriam, pp. 45–56.
• 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 0-684-10114-9
• Klein, Aldo Luiz (2000) Warming e o cerrado brasileiro um século depois. São Paulo, UNESP. 156 pp. ISBN 85-7139-354-0

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eugen Warming.

• Works by or about Eugenius Warming at Internet Archive
• Wikimedia Commons: "Om Skudbygning, Overvintring og Foryngelse"
• Biographical sketch
• Encyclopædia Britannica Online: Warming