| During the early 1880s the already prolific botanical literature in Germany saw an increase in the number of contributions dealing with the relationship between plant structures and their functions, particularly the relationship between the details of internal structure and factors in the external environment of the plant. This work gradually increased in volume and sophistication during the 1880s and 1890s and came to include studies of vegetation found in exotic regions as well as studies of native European plants. When they gave it a specific name, the Germans usually called this new line of research "plant biology." Today this work would fall within the province of ecology, although the term ecological plant physiology best describes what these botanists were doing.;If Darwinism was an important source of stimulus for their ecological research, so also was their field experience in foreign lands. As a result of Germany's colonial expansion in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, opportunities developed for German scientists to carry on their research far beyond the political boundaries of the Reich. The botanists under consideration in this study were especially well prepared to take advantage of these opportunities, since they had a research program designed to investigate the relationship of environmental factors to organic form and function. Since most of the travel opportunities were in the tropics, where plants exist under conditions quite unfamiliar to the botanist trained in central Europe, firsthand experience of the diverse array of adaptive phenomena exhibited by tropical plants served to reinforce the environmental emphasis of their work. Their most important ecological studies, in fact, involved non-European plants. Nevertheless, they continually stressed the need to apply the knowledge of plant adaptation gained in exotic lands toward understanding adaptive phenomena in native European vegetation. They did not have practical applications in mind; they simply wanted to use their experiences outside Europe to gain insights into the organization and behavior of the familiar plants upon which most of their anatomical and physiological knowledge was based. They also did not take an active interest in the economic exploitation of the colonies, especially during the period to which this study is confined. Instead, they took advantage of Germany's imperial venture to extend their research experience--to engage, as it were, in a kind of intellectual imperialism.;The authors of these studies--Gottlieb Haberlandt, Georg Volkens, Ernst Stahl, A. F. W. Schimper, Heinrich Schenck, and others--were young botanists born, for the most part, in the 1850s. Their botanical training had a strong physiological orientation and, equally important, they were among the first generation of German botanists to come of age, so to speak, within a Darwinian universe--they attended universities in the 1870s and early 1880s, when Darwinism was enjoying its greatest popularity in Germany. With their backgrounds in plant physiology, they saw in the concept of natural selection the key to explaining the manifold and complex adaptations of plants to biotic and abiotic factors in their environments. As much as any single group of biologists in the nineteenth century, these German botanists attempted to apply the concept of natural selection directly to their own research. |
