Johann Amman, Johannes Amman or Иоганн Амман (22 December 1707 in

Schaffhausen Schaffhausen (; gsw, Schafuuse; french: Schaffhouse; it, Sciaffusa; rm, Schaffusa; en, Shaffhouse) is a town with historic roots, a municipality in northern Switzerland, and the capital of the canton of the same name; it has an estimat ...

– 14 December 1741 in St Petersburg) was a Swiss-Russian botanist, a member of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...

and professor of botany at the

Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across t ...

at St Petersburg.

Notable work

He is best known for his ''Stirpium Rariorum in Imperio Rutheno Sponte Provenientium Icones et Descriptiones'' published in 1739 with descriptions of some 285 plants from

Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russia, wh ...

and Ruthenia (now

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian invas ...

). The plates are unsigned, though an engraving on the dedicatory leaf of the work is signed "Philipp Georg Mattarnovy", a Swiss-Italian engraver, Filippo Giorgio Mattarnovi (1716–1742), who worked at the St. Petersburg Academy.

Life

Amman was a student of

Herman Boerhaave Herman Boerhaave (, 31 December 1668 – 23 September 1738Underwood, E. Ashworth. "Boerhaave After Three Hundred Years." ''The British Medical Journal'' 4, no. 5634 (1968): 820–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20395297.) was a Dutch botanist ...

Leyden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration with ...

from where he graduated as a physician in 1729. He came from

in Switzerland in 1729 to help

Hans Sloane Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet (16 April 1660 – 11 January 1753), was an Irish physician, naturalist, and collector, with a collection of 71,000 items which he bequeathed to the British nation, thus providing the foundation of the British Mu ...

curate his natural history collection. Sloane was founder of the

Chelsea Physic Garden The Chelsea Physic Garden was established as the Apothecaries' Garden in London, England, in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries to grow plants to be used as medicines. This four acre physic garden, the term here referring to the s ...

and originator of the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docume ...

. Amman went on to St Petersburg at the invitation of Johann Georg Gmelin (1709–1755) and became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, regularly sending interesting plants, such as ''

Gypsophila paniculata ''Gypsophila paniculata'', the baby's breath, common gypsophila or panicled baby's-breath, is a species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae, native to central and eastern Europe. It is an herbaceous perennial growing to tall and ...

'', back to Sloane.

Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, t ...

maintained a lively correspondence with Amman between 1736 and 1740. Amman founded the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences on

Vasilyevsky Island Vasilyevsky Island (russian: Васи́льевский о́стров, Vasilyevsky Ostrov, V.O.) is an island in St. Petersburg, Russia, bordered by the Bolshaya Neva and Malaya Neva Rivers (in the delta of the Neva River) in the south ...

in St Petersburg in 1735. In 1739 he married Elisabetha Schumacher, daughter of Johann Daniel Schumacher, the court librarian in St Petersburg.

Naming

'' Ammannia'' of the

Lythraceae Lythraceae is a family of flowering plants, including 32 genera, with about 620 species of herbs, shrubs, and trees. The larger genera include '' Cuphea'' (275 spp.), '' Lagerstroemia'' (56), '' Nesaea'' (50), '' Rotala'' (45), and '' Lythru ...

was named not for Johann Amman, but for

Paul Amman Paul Amman (31 August 1634 – 4 February 1691), German physician and botanist. Biography Amman was born at Breslau in 1634. In 1662 he received the degree of doctor of physic from the university of Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) i ...

(1634–1691), botanist, physiologist and director of the ''Hortus Medicus'' at the

University of Leipzig Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...

and who published work on Materia medica in 1675. Johann Amman is denoted by the author abbreviation Amman when citing a

botanical name A botanical name is a formal scientific name conforming to the ''International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants'' (ICN) and, if it concerns a plant cultigen, the additional cultivar or Group epithets must conform to the '' Inte ...

Notes

External links

Linnaeus.c18.net: Johann Amman correspondence with Carl Linnaeus
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Amman, Johannes Botanists from the Russian Empire Ukrainian botanists 1707 births 1741 deaths Fellows of the Royal Society Leiden University alumni People from Schaffhausen Botanists with author abbreviations 18th-century Swiss botanists