Bolesław Kotula (27 October 1849 – 19 August 1898) was a Polish naturalist and teacher. He made extensive studies of the flora and fauna of the

Przemyśl Przemyśl () is a city in southeastern Poland with 56,466 inhabitants, as of December 2023. Data for territorial unit 1862000. In 1999, it became part of the Podkarpackie Voivodeship, Subcarpathian Voivodeship. It was previously the capital of Prz ...

area and contributed especially to knowledge of the plant and mollusc distributions in the Carpathians.

Life and work

Kotula was born in

Cieszyn Cieszyn ( , ; ; ) is a border town in southern Poland on the east bank of the Olza River, and the administrative seat of Cieszyn County, Silesian Voivodeship. The town has 33,500 inhabitants ( and lies opposite Český Těšín in the Czech Repu ...

, the son of Andrzej Kotula and Anna née Tetla. He had siblings:

Jerzy Jerzy is the Polish version of the masculine given name George. The most common nickname for Jerzy is Jurek (), which may also be used as an official first name. Occasionally the nickname Jerzyk may be used, which means "swift" in Polish. Peop ...

, Ludmiła Anna, Ludomir, and Rudolf. He also had a half-sister, Emilia, from his mother's first marriage. After graduating from secondary school in Cieszyn in 1868 he went to the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (, ) is a public university, public research university in Vienna, Austria. Founded by Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria, Duke Rudolph IV in 1365, it is the oldest university in the German-speaking world and among the largest ...

and studied medicine before transferring to physics. In 1871 he was a student at the

Jagiellonian University The Jagiellonian University (, UJ) is a public research university in Kraków, Poland. Founded in 1364 by Casimir III the Great, King Casimir III the Great, it is the oldest university in Poland and one of the List of oldest universities in con ...

where he graduated the next year. He worked as an assistant to Maksymilian Nowicki. He moved to Przemyśl in 1875 as a teacher of mathematics and natural history at the junior high school. Here he worked until 1888, inculcating an interest in the natural sciences among his students. He collected plant specimens in the region and donated 4002 herbarium sheets in 1878 collected mainly from the Przemyśl area. He collaborated with Professor Nowicki who had worked on beetles in the museum of the Dzieduszycki family. In 1888 he donated another collection with material from the upper San and Striąź region. He suffered from neurasthenia and went to European sanatoriums including to Baltimore in the US and England from where he returned in 1891. He died during a botanical expedition to the Geisterspitze in the Alps along with his brother Andrzej. Unable to afford a guide they travelled carelessly and he slipped through thin ice and fell into a crevasse in the Ebenferner glacier. Kotula made studies on the altitudinal distributions of plants and snails in the Tatra mountains. A species of snail is named after him as '' Hessemilimax kotulae'' (Westerlund, 1883) which was originally described with the wrong Latin gender ending as ''Semilimax kotulai.''

References

External links

O Pionowźm Rozsiedleniu ślimaków tatrzańskich
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kotula, Bolesław 1849 births 1898 deaths 19th-century Polish botanists