Hugo von Mohl

Hugo von Mohl FFRS HFRSE (8 April 1805 – 1 April 1872) was a German botanist from Stuttgart. He was the first person to use the word "protoplasm". He was a son of the Württemberg statesman Benjamin Ferdinand von Mohl (1766–1845), the family being connected on both sides with the higher class of state officials of Württemberg. While a pupil at the gymnasium, he pursued botany and mineralogy in his leisure time, till in 1823 he entered the University of Tübingen. After graduating with distinction in medicine he went to Munich, where he met a distinguished circle of botanists, and found ample material for research. This seems to have determined his career as a botanist, and he started in 1828 those anatomical investigations which continued till his death. In 1832 he was appointed professor of botany in Tübingen, a post which he never left. Unmarried, his pleasures were in his laboratory and library, and in perfecting optical apparatus and microscopic preparations, for which he showed extraordinary manual skill. He was largely a self-taught botanist from boyhood, and, little influenced in his opinions even by his teachers, preserved always his independence of view on scientific questions. He received many honours during his lifetime, and was elected foreign fellow of the Royal Society in 1868. The process of cell division as observed under a microscope was first discovered by Hugo von Mohl in 1835 as he worked on green algae Cladophora glomerata. Mohl's writings cover a period of forty-four years; the most notable of them were republished in 1845 in a volume entitled Vermischte Schriften (For lists of his works see Botanische Zeitung, 1872, p. 576, and Royal Soc. Catalogue, 1870, vol. iv.) They dealt with a variety of subjects, but chiefly with the structure of the higher forms, including both rough anatomy and minute histology. The word protoplasm was his suggestion; the nucleus had already been recognized by R. Brown and others; but Mohl showed in 1844 that the protoplasm is the source of those movements which at that time excited so much attention.