ABSTRACT
Carl Wilhelm Nageli, the son of a country doctor, was born at Kilchberg near Zurich on March 26, 1817. He was a man of delicate constitution. It was at Geneva that Nageli wrote the dissertation Die Cirsien der Schweiz, with which he took his doctor’s degree at Zurich in 1848. Probably the happiest period of his life, and certainly the most fruitful epoch of his working career, were the three years from 1852 to 1855 when he was professor at Freiburg im Breisgau. From that time down to the date of Nageli’s death, a very large number of Hieracia were planted and kept under observation by him in the Munich Botanical Gardens. Whereas Gregor Johann Mendel's relationships with Nageli were of great importance to Mendel’s life and work, his connexion with Anton Kerner von Marilaun, the other great hybridiser of that epoch, remains no more than an episode.
