Cassel, Franz-Peter (1784-1821)

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Also known as: Cassel, François

Botanist and rector of the University of Ghent. He was born in Cologne on 3 November 1784 and died in Ghent on June 8, 1821.

Biography

Franz-Peter Cassel was the son of the physician Regnier-Joseph-Antoine-Alexandre Cassel. He began his education in his hometown of Cologne and took classes from Ferdinand Franz Walraff (1748-1824), Peter Franz Gall, Christian Kramp, Faber, Joeckel and others. He acquired an extensive knowledge of the sciences and learned several modern and classical languages. The young Cassel then enrolled at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. There he was taught by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), among others, to whom he dedicated all of his works. In 1805, Cassel received a doctorate in medicine in Paris. He returned to his homeland and was appointed professor of zoology, botany and chemistry at the Gymnasium of Cologne.

In 1817, the administration of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands offered Cassel a position as full professor of natural history at the science faculty of the newly founded State University of Ghent. The universities of the Southern Netherlands at this time were struggling with a lack of suitable candidate professors in their own region. Therefore, the Dutch government looked for talent across regional borders. German scholars, such as Cassel, were preferred. Their innate intellectual discipline and sense of synthesis would, according to the government, counterbalanced the dominant Romanesque influence of the Southern Netherlands. Cassel accepted, and settled in the city. As a botanist, he could use the botanical garden created in 1796, which had been a part of the École centrale of Ghent.

Cassel was elected a member of the Académie royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres on Jan. 18, 1819. He was also intendant in the botanical garden, assessor in the collège de médecine de la Flandre orientale and a member of the Academia Caesarea Leopoldino-Carolina Naturae Curiosorum , the Grobherzogliche Societät für die gesamte Mineralogie and the Nature and Chemistry Society of Groningen. Cassel held the position of rector at the university from 1818 to 1819, From 1920 onwards, health problems forced him to give up his positions. He died the following year.

Works

The most important treatise on botany by Cassel was the Lehrbuch der natürlichen Pflanzenordnung, in which he proposed a classification of plants according to their anatomy, the nature of the basic principles of chemistry and the physiological knowledge of the time.

He also wrote a Morphonomia botanica which was regarded by contemporaries as a "new chapter" in botany, where Cassel noted his observations on the relative proportions of plant parts in the organs of plants The eight illustrations were realized by Adolphe Quetelet.

Publications

• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, WALLENBERG, Mich., Skizzen für Zoonomie oder das leben der Zahlen und Formen. Erster Theil, Keulen, Rommerskirchen, 1808.
• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, Die Pflanzenwelt, 1811
• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, Die Worte eines Deutschen am linken Reinufer, Keulen, 1814.
• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, Lehrbuch der natürlichen Pflanzenordnung, in Andreäschen Buchhandlung, 1817.
• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, Analyse en français du premier volume de Regni vegetabilis systema naturale, etc. d’Auguste-Pyrame DE CANDOLLE, in Annales belgiques, vol. 3, p. 106, 1819.
• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, Oratio de utilitate studii Historiae scientiarum physicarum, Habita Gandae, IV octobris MDCCCXIX, cum Magistratum academicum deponeret, Gand, 1819, vertaald in de Annales belgiques, vol. IV, 1819, 251-267.
• CASSEL, Franz-Peter, Morphonomia botanica sive observationes circa proportionem et evolutionem partium plantarum, cum figuris lithographicis, Coloniae Aggripinae, M. Du Mont-Schauberg, 1820.
  

Bibliography

• PLATEAU, F., "F.-P. Cassel", in Liber memorialis: Université de Gand: notices biographiques, Gent, 1913, p.3-8.
• Nova acta physico-medica Academiae caesareae Leopoldino-Carolinae, vol. 11, Bonn, 1825, p. 35-40
• VAN OYE, Paul, Anderhalve eeuw biologie aan de rijksuniversiteit te Gent, in verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor wetenschappen, letteren en schone kunsten van België, Brussel, 1968, p. 7-16.