- Hendrik van Rijgersma
The Dutch
naturalist Hendrik Elingsz van Rijgersma (bornJanuary 5 ,1835 inLemmer , Province ofFriesland , theNetherlands , diedMarch 4 ,1877 in St. Martin) was aphysician and amateurbotanist ,malacologist andichthyologist . He became a physician in 1858, and practiced medicine in the small town ofJisp and on the island ofMarken . In 1861 he married Maria Henriette Gräfing; they had seven children.When slavery was abolished in the
Dutch colonies in 1863, he was one of six physicians appointed to provide medical care to the liberated slaves on the island ofSt. Martin in theNetherlands Antilles , where he served as government physician until his untimely death at the age of 42. There he collected many fossils, plants, birds, reptiles, fishes, mollusks, crustaceans and insects.Hendrik van Rijgersma was an excellent painter and left to posterity many, mostly unpublished, drawings, sketches and water colors of plants, shells and other subjects.
His animal collections were sent by him to the
Academy of Natural Sciences ofPhiladelphia , of which he was a corresponding member.The plants he sent to the Berlin herbarium were destroyed. There apparently are also plants he collected at theNational Herbarium of the Netherlands atLeyden .In theSwedish Museum of Natural History , there are 129 plants collected by van Rijgersma, of which 74 have illustrations.Works by and about Rijgersma
* [http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/search?q=Hendrik+van+Rijgersma&qt=results_page WorldCat]
References
* [http://www.nrm.se/theswedishmuseumofnaturalhistory/researchandcollections/botany/phanerogamicbotany/botanicalhistory/hendrikvanrijgersma.536_en.html Biography by Mia Ehn, Swedish Museum of Natural History]
* Ehn, Mia & Zanoni, T. A. "The herbarium and botanical art of Hendrik Elingsz van Rijgersma", Taxon 51: 513-520, 2002.External links
* [http://www.nrm.se/theswedishmuseumofnaturalhistory/researchandcollections/botany/phanerogamicbotany/botanicalhistory/hendrikvanrijgersma/plantscollectedbyvanrijgersma.537_en.html Plants collected by Rijgersma at the Swedish Museum of Natural History]
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