Johannes Paulus Lotsy

#OTD Happy birthday to the eminent Dutch botanist and geneticist born in Dordrecht, John Paulus Lotsy (April 11, 1867), author of "Some Euphorbiaceae from Guatemala" (1895).

He spent two years from 1893 to 1895 at Johns Hopkins University and presented his entire Herbarium to the Baltimore Women's College. The collection was started when Lotsy was a boy, and Lotsy himself gathered every specimen personally. Before leaving for an appointment as botanist to the Dutch Botanical Gardens in Java (known as the Garden of the East), Lotsy gifted his entire Herbarium - which contained about six thousand species, being especially rich in the flowering plants of Europe, in the desert Hora of Algiers, in algae, lichens, cryptogams, mosses, seeds, and water plants.

Dr. Goucher of Johns Hopkins acknowledged,

"The special value of the herbarium, is that it is collected by an eminent botanist not merely to contain as many species as possible, but to afford illustration of the principles of vegetable morphology and of adaptation of plants to peculiar conditions of environment."

John Paulus Lotsy died in Amsterdam at the age of 64.