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birth
5 April 1804 -
What he did
Schleiden was educated at Heidelberg (1824–27) and practiced law in Hamburg but soon developed his hobby of botany into a full-time pursuit. Repelled by contemporary botanists’ emphasis on classification, Schleiden preferred to study plant structure under the microscope. While professor of botany at the University of Jena, he wrote “Contributions to Phytogenesis” (1838), in which he stated that the different parts of the plant organism are composed of cells or derivatives of cells. -
Death
23 June 1881