Miss Dorothea F. M. Pertz

Abstract

DORA PERTZ, who died on March 6, a few days before reaching her eightieth birthday, was born in 1859 into a cosmopolitan, intellectual milieu, for owhich it would be difficult to-day to find a parallel. Her father was Dr. G. H. Pertz, a scholar of worldwide repute, and Royal Librarian in Berlin. His first wife was a brilliant Englishwoman, who counted Sismondi and Lafayette among her friends. His second wife, Dora's mother, also an Englishwoman, was one of a remarkable group of sisters, the six daughters of Leonard Homer, a prominent early member of the Geological Society, and twice its president. He was evidently a man of unusual breadth of view, for though he was born at so remote a date as 1785, he was sufficiently open-minded to commend Darwin's speculations in his last address to the Geological Society in 1861. Homer's eldest daughter was married to Sir Charles Lyell, and his second daughter to Sir Charles J. F. Bunbury, a botanist, who, under Lyell's influence, turned his attention to fossil plants.