Fritz Müller, a naturalist in Brazil

Charles Darwin called him 'prince of observers' and counted him among those whose opinions he valued most. Ernst Haeckel acknowledged a debt to him for his own biogenetic law, 'ontogeny recapitulates philogeny.' And at his death in 1897, the obituary writer in Nature questioned 'whether any other naturalist, save Darwin himself, has given the world so large and original a mass of observations of the kind by which natural selection has been most strongly supported.' Yet today, Fritz Muller is largely ignored in books about the great nineteenth-century naturalists. Muller was more than a naturalist. He was an enthusiastic liberal, one reason why he had to leave Germany, which after the failure of the 1848 revolution was ruled by ultra-conservatives. He had a good university education, yet did not hesitate in Brazil to earn his living as a farmer. He published countless natural history observations throughout his life, on insects and other animals, and his later years particularly on plants. His best known discovery is that of Mullerian mimicry, the imitation of the appearance of toxic species by other toxic species.

Biografia, Autobiografia, Memórias