Ferdinand Julius Cohn

Ferdinand Julius Cohn (1828-1898), German botanist and bacteriologist, born at Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), and educated at the universities of Breslau and Berlin. In 1859 he became professor of botany at Breslau, serving in that position until his death. Often called the founder of the science of bacteriology, Cohn studied microscopic organisms and demonstrated that bacteria are plants. He studied the morphology of algae and fungi and analyzed the bacterial causes of infectious plant and animal diseases. He discovered the nature and principal properties of bacterial spores, and he assisted the German physician and bacteriologist Robert Koch in the preparation of his famous treatise on anthrax. In 1872 Cohn published the first classification of bacteria based on morphology.