József Dorner

Hungarian educator and botanist (1808–1873) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

József Dorner (2 November 1808 – 9 October 1873), was a Hungarian educator and botanist.

Born
József Thurner junior

(1808-11-02)2 November 1808[1]
Győr[1]
Died9 October 1873(1873-10-09) (aged 64)[1][2][a]
Pest, Hungary[1]
Resting place
Fiume Road Graveyard[3]
OthernamesDorner József,[4] I. Dorner,[5] Josef Dorner,[6] Joseph von Dorner,[7] Joseph von Dörner,[8] Josef von Dorner,[9] Thurner József.
Quick facts Born, Died ...
József Dorner
Sepia-toned portrait of József Dorner.
Portrait of Dorner, 1865.
Born
József Thurner junior

(1808-11-02)2 November 1808[1]
Győr[1]
Died9 October 1873(1873-10-09) (aged 64)[1][2][a]
Pest, Hungary[1]
Resting place
Fiume Road Graveyard[3]
Other namesDorner József,[4] I. Dorner,[5] Josef Dorner,[6] Joseph von Dorner,[7] Joseph von Dörner,[8] Josef von Dorner,[9] Thurner József.
Scientific career
FieldsBotany, chemistry, histology
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He was born József Thurner the Younger, was born to German parents József Thurner the Elder, a merchant, and Zsuzsanna Schmidt.[10] A pharmacist by trade, he also worked as a schoolteacher and is best known today as a botanist.[11]

By 1831, or 1834,[10] he had changed his family name to Dorner at the time of his registration as a nobleman.[12] This spelling is also his botanical author abbreviation Dorner.[13] According to Szmodits, he married in 1845 but they remained childless,[14] with his wife predeceasing him.[10]

Education, careers in pharmacy and teaching

Initially, Dorner went to school in his hometown of Győr, up to lower secondary school.[14] He completed his secondary education in Sopron, and from 1824 to 1827 he undertook further training as an apprentice at the Kochmeister-run Magyar Korona (Hungarian Crown) pharmacy in Sopron, before passing his examinations and receiving an assistantship.[12] With this qualification, he worked as a pharmacy attendant in Pest and Bratislava.[14] Dorner then enrolled at the University of Vienna and the Polytechnic Institute[2] (now TU Vienna) to study pharmacy, including subjects in botany and chemistry, which he completed in 1832.[10][15]

From 1836 to 1840, he ran a pharmacy in Bratislava called the Arany Korona (Golden Crown), that had been purchased for him by his father.[10][14] However, he sold the business soon after, and went to take a position in the health department of the Lieutenancy Council in Buda.[10][14] In 1848, Baron József Eötvös, the minister of religion and public education, offered him a teaching role, which he accepted.[10][14] By 1853, he had become a professor of natural history at the Lutheran lyceum in Szarvas, and from 1860 until his death, he was a professor at the Pest Evangelical upper-grammar school (Obergymnasium).[6][16][2] He also taught at Deák Téri Evangélikus Gimnázium in Budapest.[17] Alongside his specialty of the natural sciences, he also taught German and French.[12]

Botanical work

In the 1830s, Dorner came into contact with other botanists, and in 1835 went on a botanical expedition with János Heuffel and Anton Rochel to the Banat.[6] After the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, he retired from government work and instead pursued botanical studies.[16]

Although Dorner intended to compose a Flora of Hungary with his botanical colleagues József Sadler and János Heuffel, the plans never came to fruition after the death of Sadler in 1849,[18] and the retirement of Heuffel due to ill health.[10][15] Instead, he wrote smaller monographic works and papers in Hungarian and foreign journals. [15] By 1858, Dorner became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and subsequently published 167 articles in the academy's Bulletin.[14] He was also a member of the Imperial-Royal Zoological-Botanical Society (Kaiserlich-königliche zoologisch-botanische Gesellschaft, the predecessor of the Zoological-Botanical Society in Austria [de]).[12]

He was particularly interested in plant anatomy and plant physiology, and in turn, was a skilled microscopist.[12] Dorner also shared his research on the development of cells with German scientists.[19] At the same time, through these professional networks, Dorner was aware of wider innovations in science, including the theory of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin, and the botanical research of Asa Gray.[19]

The majority of Dorner's botanical specimens were collected within the present-day territory of Hungary, but are now found in herbaria worldwide. This includes the Meise Botanic Garden herbarium, the National Museum of Natural History, France, Kew Herbarium, Universalmuseum Joanneum, and the National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.[20]

He also named the following species:[13]

  • Carex trachyantha Dorner (a synonym of Carex depressa subsp. transsilvanica).[21]
  • Quercus cerris var. macrophylla Dorner (a synonym of Quercus cerris).[22]

Death and burial

After a long illness Dorner passed away in October 1873, and was subsequently buried in Plot 9, Row 4, Grave 70 of the Fiume Road Graveyard in Budapest.[2][3] Before 2007, his grave was marked with a timber gabled cross but it has since been replaced with a stone obelisk.[23]

A weathered timber gabled cross grave marker in a grassy meadow.
Pre-2007 timber grave marker in the Fiume Road Graveyard.

Major publications

Note

  1. [a]
    Vozárová gives his date of death as the 3rd of October, while other sources such as Grundl state it was on the 9th of the month.

References

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