Abstract
PROF. HERMANN HELLRIEGEL, whose death took place at Bernburg, Anhalt, on September 24 last, was born at Pegau, Saxony, on October 21, 1831, so that he was within a month of completing his sixty-fourth year. His life, on the whole, was uneventful, for he devoted himself with studious zeal almost entirely to investigations, both chemical and physiological, into the phenomena of plant nutrition. One of his earliest official posts was that of Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Dahme, in Brandenburg, which was founded in 1857 by an association of agriculturists in Jüterbog-Rückenwalder. During his tenure of this post he studied experimentally the alimentary needs of certain plants which are cultivated as field crops, notably cereals, potatoes, and sugar-beet, his method involving the use of sterilised soil, both by itself and with the addition of various chemical salts. His physiological inquiries embraced observations on the growth and development of roots, on the quantity of water used in the growth and maturation of field crops, and on the minimum amounts of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash, and other ingredients required by plants. Supplemented by observations on crops grown in the open field, these investigations led Hellriegel to conclusions of great practical importance, notably in connection with sugar-beet, a crop which Germany grows more extensively than any other European country, its annual average area for the last twelve years having been 800,000 acres, or more than one-fourth of the entire European acreage.
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Hermann Hellriegel. Nature 53, 11 (1895). https://doi.org/10.1038/053011a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/053011a0