Max Wilhelm Carl Weber, 1852-1937

Abstract Max Weber, for many years professor of zoology in Amsterdam , doyen of late of the whole brotherhood of zoologists, died at Eerbeck in Gelderland on 7 February, in his eighty-fifth year. He was born at Born on 6 December, 1852, of a Dutch mother, Wilhelmina vander Kolk, and a German father, Hermann Weber, who died when his son was two years old. The boy’s guardian, Professor Perthes, sent him to school at Oberstein a|d Nahe when he was nine years old, and there he made his first museum in a cupboard, as all boy-naturalists do. He passed on to the Progymnasium at Neuwied, where a good schoolmaster made him a field-botanist ; next to the Gymnasium at Bonn ; then, his schooldays over, he came home to his people in Holland. In 1873 he entered the University of Bonn, and learned his natural history from Troschel, La Valette St. George, and especially from Franz Leydig, whose assistant he became and to whom he owed his lifelong love of comparative anatomy. In the winter of 1875—76 Weber studied in Berlin under Eduard von Martens, famous as a conchologist, a man of fine taste and liberal education, who had travelled and collected in the East ; it was he who stirred in Weber the ambition to travel and explore. Here Weber wrote his first paper, Ueber die Nahrung der Alausa vulgaris, und über die Spermatophore von Temora velox, Lillj. ; it was a prize essay, and a trip to Switzerland, Weber’s first taste of travel, was the reward. During all these years in Bonn and in Berlin Weber was a medical student as well as a student of natural history, and he took a medical degree, as the naturalists of those days usually did. He returned to Bonn in 1877 and there took his Doctorate with a dissertation on Die Nebenorgane des Auges von einheimischen Lacertiden. He now did his year of military service, acting half as medial officer and half as hussar!