Dorothea Pertz

Dorothea Frances Matilda Pertz FLS (14 March 1859 – 6 March 1939) was a British botanist. She co-authored five papers with Francis Darwin, Charles Darwin's son. She was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society, among the first women admitted to full membership.

Biography

Dora Pertz was born in London on 14 March 1859 to Georg Heinrich Pertz and his second wife, Leonora Horner, daughter of Leonard Horner, who was a progressive intellectual and an adamant supporter of Darwinism, a fact he noted in his final address. Through family connections she met many prominent naturalists including Darwin. Pertz spent most of her youth in Berlin, where her father was Royal Librarian, though they visited England each year. After her father's death in 1876, Pertz moved to Florence with her mother. Later she returned to England and in 1882 she was admitted to Newnham College, Cambridge. She spent a year in Italy before returning to Cambridge in 1884. during this period she also collaborated with William Bateson, and she published a paper with him concerning inheritance in Veronica. She also produced two papers independently. though she did not take part in the movement advocating for women to be fellows. After Darwin's retirement, Pertz was encouraged by Frederick Blackman to undertake research on meristematic tissue, but after a year observing germinating seeds her results were inconclusive.

After Pertz had given up research, at Blackman's suggestion she worked on indexing German literature on plant physiology, including the journals Biochemische Zeitschrift and Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie. Despite the difficulty of the task, she completed the index up to the year 1935.

And with Francis Darwin:

}