Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (4 February 1776,

Bremen Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (german: Stadtgemeinde Bremen, ), is the capital of the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (''Freie Hansestadt Bremen''), a two-city-state consis ...

– 16 February 1837, Bremen) was a German physician, naturalist, and

proto-evolutionary biologist Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieva ...

. His younger brother,

Ludolph Christian Treviranus Ludolph Christian Treviranus (18 September 1779 in Bremen – 6 May 1864 in Bonn) was a German botanist born in Bremen. He was a younger brother to naturalist Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776–1837). In 1801 he earned his doctorate at th ...

(1779–1864), was also a naturalist and botanist, and also a notable taxonomist and zoologist.

History

Treviranus was born in

and studied medicine at the University of Göttingen, where he took his doctor's degree in 1796. During the following year, he was appointed professor of medicine and

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

at the Bremen lyceum. In 1816, he was elected a corresponding member of the

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special ...

Works

Treviranus was a proponent of the theory of the transmutation of species, a theory of evolution held by some biologists prior to the work of Charles Darwin. He put forward this belief in the first volume of his ''Biologie; oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur'', published in 1802, the same year similar opinions were expressed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In the 1830s, he was the first to identify rod

photoreceptor cell A photoreceptor cell is a specialized type of neuroepithelial cell found in the retina that is capable of visual phototransduction. The great biological importance of photoreceptors is that they convert light (visible electromagnetic radiatio ...

s in the retina using a microscope.

Selected writings

* ''Biologie; oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur für Naturforscher und Aerzte'', (1802–22). * ''Beiträge zur Lehre von den Gesichtswerkzeugen und dem Sehen des Menschen und der Thiere'', (1828). * ''Beiträge zur Aufklärung der Erscheinungen und Gesetze des organischen Lebens'' (with Ludolph Christian Treviranus), (1835–38).WorldCat Search
(publications)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold Proto-evolutionary biologists 1776 births 1837 deaths German naturalists Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Physicians from Bremen 19th-century German biologists 19th-century German botanists 19th-century German physicians Scientists from Bremen