Raoul Heinrich Francé

Raoul Heinrich Francé (born May 20, 1874 in Vienna, Austria; died October 3, 1943 in Budapest, Hungary) was an Austro-Hungarian botanist, microbiologist as well as a natural and cultural philosopher and popularizer of science. His botanical author abbreviation is "Francé". Raoul Heinrich Francé (birth name: Rudolf Heinrich Franze) was born on 20 May 1874 in Altlerchenfeld (Vienna) and studied as a self-taught very early in analytical chemistry and "Mikrotechnik" (microscopy). At 16 he was the youngest member of the Royal Hungarian scientific society, as its deputy magazine editor, he worked from 1893 to 1898. From 1897 Francé studied biology for eight semesters and became a student under the Hungarian protozoa scientist (Protozoenforscher) Geza Entz. During this time he undertook fourteen botanical expeditions. In 1898 he was appointed Deputy Head of the Institute of Plant Protection of Agricultural Academy in Hungarian-Altenburg. Here he published his first natural philosophical work. Thereupon Francé received in 1902 the invitation to come to Munich. In 1906 he founded the "Deutsche Mikrologische Gesellschaft" (German micrological Company) and its institution over which he presided as director. He was editor of this company and co-founder of the journal Mikrokosmos (1907). He was editor of other periodicals, such as Jahrbuch für Mikroskopiker and Mikrologische Bibliothek. In 1906 Francé initiated the eight-volume monumental work Das Leben der Pflanze ("The Life of Plants"), whose first four volumes (1906–1910) are from his own pen. The publishing company advertised this book as "Pflanzen-Brehm" ("Plant-Brehm", after the famous book "Brehms Tierleben"). In 1922, he published a popular version of the scientific evidence on the soil biota in a booklet "Das Leben im Ackerboden" (Life in the soil). Throughout his busy life he wrote 60 books and a variety of popular science articles and writings. Francé's Germs of Mind in Plants was his only book translated into English by A. M Simons.