A frog telephones the Psychic Hotline and is told: "You are going to meet a beautiful young girl who will want to know everything about you."
The frog says: "This is great! Will I meet her at a party, or what?"
"No," says the psychic: "Next semester, in her biology class."
Wilhelm HofmeisterBorn 18 May 1824; died 12 Jan 1877 at age 52. Wilhelm Friedrich Benedikt Hofmeister was a German botanist who began as a music-seller, completely self-taught in botany, yet a pioneer in comparative plant morphology, though eclipsed by his contemporaries. Perhaps he was too far ahead in his time: out of step with the majority. He studied the most extensive array of plants then assembled, gleaning their basic common features to form a unifying perspective with a genius that has been compared to Darwin and Mendel. Despite very severe short-sightness, he described specimens with remarkably extensive detail using the microscope. Hofmeister did ground-breaking work in plant embryology, plant life histories, and principles of plant growth and development. He revealed the “alternation of generations” (1862), the life cycle pattern between sporophyte and gametophyte in the lower plants.« |
