Matthias Jacob Schleiden, also spelled Matthias Jakob Schleiden(born April 5, 1804, Hamburg [Germany]—died June 23, 1881,Frankfurt am Main, Germany) German botanist, cofounder (withTheodor Schwann) of the cell theory.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. Thus, Schleiden became the first to formulate what was then an informal belief as a principle of biology equal in importance to the atomic theory of chemistry. He also recognized the importance of the cell nucleus, discovered in 1831 by the Scottish botanistRobert Brown, and sensed its connection with cell division. Schleiden was one of the first German biologists to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution. He became professor of botany at Dorpat, Russia, in 1863.
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: Matthias Jakob Schleiden, a German botanist, concluded that all plant tissues are composed of cells and that an embryonic plant arose from a single cell. He declared that the cell is the basic building block of all plant matter. This statement of Schleiden was the first generalizations concerning cells.
Born in Hamburg and educated in law at Heidelberg, Schleiden left law practice to study botany, which he then taught at the University of Jena from 1839 to 1862. A man of disputatious nature he scorned the botanists of his day who limited themselves to merely naming and describing plants. Schlieden investigated plants microscopically and conceived that plants were made up of recongnizable units, or cells. Plant growth, he stated in 1837, came about through the production of new cells, which, he speculated, where prophagates from the nuclei of old cells. Although later discoveries proved him wrong about the role of the nucleus in mitosis, or cell division, his conception of the cell as the common structural unit of plants had the profound effect of shifting scientific attention to living processes as they happened on the cellular level-a change that initiated the field of embryology. A year after Schleiden published his cell theory on plants, his friend Schwann extended it to animals, thereby bringing botany and zoology together under one unifying theory. |
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Schleiden was one of the first German biologists to accept Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. He became professor of botany at the University of Dorpat in 1863. He concluded that all plant parts are made of cells and that an embryonic plant organism arises from the one cell. He died in Frankfurt am Main on 23 June 1881.
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