Weberbauer, August (1871-1948)
Between 1901 and 1948, August Weberbauer took numerous trips through Peru and assembled vast collections of more than 8,000 botanical objects for the Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Prussian Academy of the Sciences), the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago und the Universidad Mayor San Marcos in Lima. On these expeditions he discovered and classified numerous new plants, and more than 250 species have been named after him.
Except for the brief period during which he served as director of the Victoria Botanical Garden in Cameroon (1906-1907), Weberbauer devoted himself to studying the world of Peruvian plants. In 1908 he was appointed director of the Botanical and Zoological Gardens in Lima, and from 1922 he served as professor of botany and pharmaceutical chemistry at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos in Lima.
Weberbauer laid the foundation for systematic botany in Peru, and his work El mundo vegetal de los Andes (The Flora of the Peruvian Andes) continues to rank among the ten most important works on Peruvian botany today.
His papers include seven diaries, seven travelogues, fifty-three notebooks, thirteen manuscripts, six sets of notes, one meteorological report, two literature lists, twelve plant catalogs, as well as official documents, photographs and other materials.
The items not only provide insight into the life and work of an important pioneer of Peruvian botany, but also offer geological, climatological, geographical and ethnographic information about Peru between 1901 and 1948.
This partial set of Weberbauer's papers was purchased in 2000 with the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).