Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti: [A Botanical Pioneer In South West China] - Biography
Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti
This biographical memoir is based on the detailed obituary by Handel-Mazzetti's friend and contemporary Erwin Janchen(1) (Berichte der deutschen botanischen Gesellschaft, 57, 179-201 [1940], with portrait and bibliography). This information has been supplemented by reminiscences kindly provided by Hofrat Professor K.H. Rechinger(2), who worked in the same room as Handel-Mazzetti in the Vienna University Botanical Institute in the twenties and thirties, acted as an emissary between Handel-Mazzetti and Keissler, the Director of the Department of Botany in the Natural History Museum, after their quarrel, and got to know him as intimately as was possible for anyone outside his family circle. Further details have been gleaned from his own writings and those of his contemporaries.
Heinrich Freiherr (Baron) von Handel-Mazzetti was born in Vienna on 19th February 1882. His family, still well represented in Austria today, trace their origins to a Franz Handel in Dettingen near Frankfurt in 1556, his forebears having migrated from Handel in Brabant a century earlier. Handel-Mazzetti's grandfather, Heinrich Freiherr von Handel, was a senior officer in the Austrian Army. He married Caroline Freiin (Baroness) von Mazzetti, and as she was the last of her family they decided to perpetuate her family name by joining it to his. Their son Eduard, born in Pavia in 1838, was the botanist's father. Perhaps the most widely known member of the family is the novelist Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti (1871-1955), a daughter of one of Eduard's brothers, the author of "Die Hochzeit von Quedlinburg" and other historical romances.
In 1881 Eduard married Fredina Marchesa de Mauro, born in Florence in 1853. Her mother, the daughter of a German family originally from East Prussia, moved to Germany after her husband's death in 1854. Fredina's earliest memories were of the flowers and animals of Nonnenwerth, an island in the Rhine near Bonn. As Handel-Mazzetti's mother grew up she developed a deep love of nature, which she passed on to all her sons, notably to Heinrich, her first-born. Heinrich was devoted to his mother. He dedicated his monograph on Taraxacum (1907) to her and named one of the new species that he discovered in China in her honour (Arenaria fridericae). Touching evidence of his affection is to be found in his account of their reunion after his five years' absence in China (Chapter 42).
At the time of Heinrich's birth in 1882 his father was serving as an officer on the General Staff in Vienna. His twin brothers Hermann and Friedrich were born there in 1883, followed in 1885, after his father had been posted to Innsbruck to command 15th Infantry Brigade, by his youngest brother Eduard. The four brothers always thought of themselves as Tyroleans and remained on the best of terms all their lives. Hermann accompanied Heinrich on several of his botanical tours in Europe and himself published nearly seventy papers on the flora of Tyrol, where he lived until his death in 1963. His interests extended to zoology, folklore and local history. Eduard (1885-1950) became an artist of some distinction and painted the picture of Handel-Mazzetti on horseback in the Salween gorge (front cover); it hangs in the Vienna Botanical Institute and Handel-Mazzetti chose it as the frontispiece for "Naturbilder aus Sudwest China". A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1990 [Tiroler Impulse fur Bildung und Kultur, 7, Nr.4, 1990].
The brothers had their first schooling from their mother at home and not until he was ten years old did Heinrich go to school in Innsbruck, where his teacher of natural history was Karl Wilhelm von Dalla Tome (1850-1928), a botanist and entomologist, and author of Flora der gefürsteten Grafschaft Tirol, in six volumes, 1900-1903. From 1893 to 1898 he continued his education at the Gymnasium (grammar school) at Dobling near Vienna, and after his father's death in 1898 at the Benedictine school at Seitenstetten, where the lichenologist and mycolo-gist Pius Strasser (1843-1927), author of Zur Flechtenflora Niederösterreichs, [p.V:] was among the teachers. There he passed the Reifeprüfung (matriculation) in July 1900 and that autumn began a year's military service — virtually obligatory for a man of his background — as a one-year volunteer in the Tiroler Kaiserjäger, a distinguished infantry regiment. Janchen comments that
"his physical stamina, clear sense of direction, decisiveness, steady nerves and all the military qualities that he inherited ensured an impeccable record of service."
Nevertheless, he adhered to his early resolve to devote his life to science, despite his late father's wish that he should follow him in a military career.
In the autumn of 1901 he enrolled in the University of Vienna, bringing to his studies an unusually deep knowledge of the flowering plants, ferns and even mosses of his native land. In his first semester, before his twentieth birthday, he published his first scientific paper — "A contribution to the flora of North Tyrol", followed in the same year by the description of a newly discovered natural hybrid: Gentiana tiroliensis H.-M. (= G. aspera Hegetschw. et Heer X G. campestris L.) — now Gentianella X tiroliensis. In Professor Richard von Wettstein he found a teacher who was sympathetic towards his scientific aspirations and who encouraged the unforced development of his natural talents, and it was mainly Wettstein's influence that caused Handel-Mazzetti to adopt the evolutionary approach to botanical affinities.
In January 1903 Handel-Mazzetti became a demonstrator in the Vienna University Botanical Institute and in September 1905 he was promoted to assistant He had now completed the required eight semesters but had not yet been awarded his doctorate, partly because his duties were so time-consuming and partly because the subject of his thesis had proved unusually difficult and laborious. His chosen theme was a monograph on the genus Taraxacum, but the material expanded to such enormous bulk that he submitted only a portion as his written dissertation and postponed publication of the complete monograph until 1907. He was awarded the degree of doctor of philosophy on 8th February 1907, his departmental head von Wettstein being his sponsor. Dr John Richards, reader in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, comments that
"The Monographie der Gattung Taraxacum was the first major taxonomic account of the genus, but unfortunately, even by the standards of its time, it was extremely poor. It names some 60 species in the genus (which now has some 2200), and many of these are confused, heterogeneous and meaningless. .... He was perhaps unlucky to bring out his work at a time when the Scandinavians Dahlstedt and Lindberg were starting to publish the 'microspecies ' and the sections which are used today (from 1900, but mostly 1905-07), and he effectively ignores their important work. His figures are poor and difficult to interpret and his photographs are almost useless. .... Yet it would be unfair to judge his ability or his later work on the basis of the monograph. This complex genus was certainly not one for a beginner to tackle so early in his professional life, when he was under pressure to publish to help his career. .... His poor grasp of relationships must be seen as the result of inexperience and of panic under pressure of time. Nevertheless, the monograph is thoroughly documented and painstakingly prepared, even if the conclusions are narrow-minded and lacking in flair."
As assistant in the Botanical Institute his main duties were the management and reorganisation of ,the herbarium; from time to time he had to hold classes in microscopy for beginners, but as he thought of himself as first and foremost a research worker this was a task for which he felt little inclination.
From his early youth Handel-Mazzetti was a keen and skilful mountaineer. Besides the mountains of Tyrol, he walked and climbed in the Tauern, the Dolomites and elsewhere in the central and southern Alps. In 1902 he visited Pula and Split on the coast of Yugoslavia and learnt something of the Mediterranean flora. In July 1904, accompanied by a few young colleagues, he led a botanical trip to west Bosnia, travelling through territory previously almost unvisited by botanists. As the most experienced and knowledgeable of the party, he was put in charge of the expedition and was responsible for describing the plants they collected. In 1905, in conjunction with his friend Friedrich Vierhapper, he led some of the participants in the International Botanical Congress on a tour through North Tyrol and the Dolomites to Upper Carinthia, and it was he who wrote the relevant section of the Congress tour guide. It was at this conference that he met Carl Schroter (1855-1940), author of the well known pocket Alpine Flora, still in print today. In 1906 he visited Switzerland (Engadine, St Gotthard, Jura), and in later life, except when he was abroad, hardly a year passed without a walking tour in the Alps. His favourite territory was Tyrol and the High Tauern, and he discovered several new plants there. Among other ranges he visited the Vosges, the Abruzzi (Majella 1924) and Mount Olympus in Thessaly (July 1927).
In 1907 Handel-Mazzetti was invited at the last minute to join a party travelling to Turkey to investigate some mines near Trabzon. Leaving Vienna on 27th June, he met his companions in Constantinople [p.vii:] — the leader K.R. von Blumencron, the geologist F. Kossmat and their dragoman Marc Bojovitch, "whose inextinguishable humour helped to entertain us even on the wettest days." After seeing the woods of maritime pine on the island of Prinkipo, they sailed through the Bosporus lo Bender Eregli, a place never before visited by a botanist; there for the first time he saw the rhododendron stands of the Pontus. Next day he landed at Samsun and noted fine avenues of Fraxinus oxycarpa. At dawn on 5th July he saw the distant summit of Sis-dagh among the clouds. After reaching Trabzon he spent a few days on short trips, notably one to a village called Stephanos. There he had a new experience:
"It was the first time 1 had sat upon a horse, and I was very pleased that all went well. There can be no comparison between the natural style of riding on these splendid Turkish steeds and the methods used on our elaborately trained horses in our own country. One can rely on the steadiness and good sense of the animal, as I found when we ascended narrow paths, barely a foot wide, up steep loose screes or along deeply cut water runnels. Some distance before reaching a difficult stretch die horse would cross to the other side of the path, and at the edge of a bog it would pause and take soundings with its hoof to find a way through."
Handel-Mazzetti quickly realised the advantages of botanising on horseback, and on his later travels in China he rode whenever possible. To an Englishman it seems surprising that a man of his family origins and military background should not have learnt to ride as a child, but though they belonged to the Mllitaradel (military nobility) his family were not wealthy and riding lessons would have been dismissed as an unnecessary extravagance.
On 9th July he left Trabzon and travelled for two days southwest to the mountain village of Pol Koi, passing along the Kalanema Dere valley where he found "the only area of genuinely Mediterranean vegetation on the north coast of Turkey," including a wood of Arbutus andrachne. The vicinity of Fol Koi was more densely forested than any other part of the Pontic coast mountains that he visited, but wherever the trees had been felled the undergrowth of Rhododendron ponticum and K. luteum prevented the forest from regenerating. Except where they had been cut down, the rhododendrons extended from the coast up to the tree-line, forming almost impenetrable thickets in which he tripped over long shoots of Colchian ivy. In low-lying spots on the mountainsides the going was even harder, as the rhododendrons were enshrouded with Clematis vitalba and Smilax excelsa, the latter having spines two centimetres long. The villagers pointed out Ardutschly Kiran, a wooded peak 1700m in height; they said it
had never been climbed because the woods were so dense and impassable. The ground flora was sparse, Campanula lactiflora being the only conspicuous plant at that season. His stay was marred by rain and mist, but the nights were clear.
"One of the greatest pleasures of our trip was to sit under the starry sky, well wrapped up against the cold (11°C), surrounded by countless fireflies, busy pressing herbarium specimens by the tight of a big petroleum lamp, ....while jackals howled in the woods across the valley."
In the forest gorges the rhododendrons were not so dense, and there were spruces, hornbeams, huge alders and gigantic crowns of oriental beech. Beneath them he found Cirsium pseudopersonatum and the ostrich-feather fem Slruthiopteris germanica.
On 13th July he travelled inland again, this time on muleback, and saw Rhododendron caucasicum On the alpine pastures of Ulugoba (2050 m) he found Scilla sibirica. On the way down he had a friendly reception from the peasants, "in oriental dress with pistol and dagger, but always amicable and without any sign of religious fanaticism."
On 15th July he left Fol Koi and went westwards over a ridge to the Greek village of Bseli. This was a clear day and he had a view of Sis Dagh, but it was merely "a misshapen hummock", not more than 2100 m high, clothed in spruce forest However, he found Acer trautvetteri, previously known only from the Caucasus. On 18th July, with a "hopeful and louseridden" Greek youth as his guide, he set out to climb Tschemlikdji Deressi in the hope of reaching the subalpine zone. In those happy days "you could not go past a Turkish house without being invited to take coffee". They climbed a cliff with some difficulty but were then stopped by dense thickets of rhododendron. On his return journey lo the coast he revisited the pinewood at Kalanema Dere. "As I now realised that the people were entirely amicable, I had no qualms about making these excursions unaccompanied ....but I had a loaded revolver in my pocket". On 31st July he left Trabzon and after a few days at Ordu returned to Vienna on 14th August.
This was his first botanical foray outside Europe and undoubtedly taught him a great deal. He discovered four new species: Herniaria zervudachii Hand.-Mzt., Orchis pontica Fleischm. et Hand.-Mzt., Chrysanthemum trapezantinum Hand.-Mzt., and Geranium jubatum Hand.-Mzt. He did not take photographs and had to rely on Dr Kossmat to provide illustrations for his article. Neither in his report on his travels nor in his botanical account does he make any mention of collecting seeds or living plants for introduction into cultivation.
In the following year, accompanied by his brother Hermann, he visited Bosnia and [p.viii:] Herzegovina. They arrived at Sinj, the railhead 30 km inland from Split, on 3rd July and travelled into the mountains, making for Konj, at 1849 m the highest and most southerly peak of the limestone range. After spending a night in the open they found Androsace villosa at only 1200m, and as they went along the ridge the flora became richer and richer, Ranunculus sartorianus and Draba longirostris being among their finds. Next day they went over the karst to Imotski and on to Posusje where they found the rare Centau-rea tuberosa. They were entertained by a friendly young priest with whom they conversed in Latin. Further on, up the wild Crvene Stiene gorge, they found Primula kitaibeliana on wet rocks beside a waterfall. Journeying on to the main peak of Cabul-ja, they encountered Sibiraea (Spiraea) croatica, but were separated from it by a chasm five metres wide. Heinrich tried to shoot some down with his revolver. He describes his attempts at photography: he used his iceaxe as a monopod, but on this occasion, unable to drive the point into the hard rock, he placed the camera on a rock above his head, aimed it at the shrub and gave a 12 second exposure, divided into two stages as the branches began to sway in the wind. The result was "not entirely unsuccessful". They returned along the Drezanka valley and on 12th July left Jablanica on horseback. However, they had to send back the horses and followed the track over Trinaca (2045m) to Grabovi-ca. Along the ridge leading to Veliki Vilinac they found Dianthus freynii, Viola zoysii, Papaver kerneri and Saxifraga moschata. Hermann's leave was now running out and they hurried on to Sarajevo to catch the train. Heinrich went on to Rogatica and Han Semec where he explored some lush forest meadows and saw Polemonium coeruleum. He visited the ruins of Hrta in the Drina gorge and on 18th July returned to Klekovaca, where he had previously been in 1907.
His next major expedition took him to Iraq (then Mesopotamia) and Kurdistan in 1910. Accompanied by the zoologist Viktor Pietschmann, he sailed from Istanbul on 1st March, and after brief visits to Mytilene, Izmir (then Smyrna) and Rhodes, he reached Iskenderun (then Alexandretta) on 7th March. He then drove in a four-horse landau to Aleppo where he stayed until 23rd March before sailing down the Euphrates. After passing the golden domes and minarets of Karbala he visited the excavations at Babylon. On 3rd May he set out along the Tigris for Mosul, travelling through sand desert with sparse but interesting vegetation. On the journey he saw Halley's comet in its full glory, not far from the morning star. On 4th June he left Mosul to make a circuit through the mountains of Kurdistan. This took him to Urfa, Ak Dagh (2670m), Diarbekr (Diyarbakir), Djeziret and back to Mosul. The highest mountain was an unnamed peak in the Armenian Taurus (2980m). His journeying was not wholly enjoyable:
"I was not sorry to leave Mesopotamia .... The temperature in the tent rose to 481 during the day and dropped to 15° at night In the evenings the simoom would fill the tent with sand and drive dust into my eyes and mouth. It often arose so suddenly that while I was busy putting plants into the press I would have to pin the papers down with both arms to prevent them from being blown away .... For up to a week we were unable to find any good water. The people were dirty, untruthful and infected with dangerous diseases ....".
He made another journey through Kurdistan, climbing Nimrud Dagh (2320m) on 12th July and seeing the tumulus of King Antiochus I. Later that month he went to Goldshik Lake and climbed Hasarbaba Dagh, the highest peak in the vicinity (2500m). On llth August he climbed Meleto Dagh, at 3190m the highest point he reached. His photograph shows a gently sloping double summit. He returned to Vienna in November with a large collection of herbarium specimens among which were over twenty new species including Salix eriopolia, Dianthus coloratus, Euphorbia sanasunitensis, Hemiaria arabica and Sedum inconspicuum.
In 1912, when Handel-Mazzetti was thirty years old, his mother was making him an allowance of three hundred crowns a year out of her income of 9800 crowns. These figures are taken from her diary for 1912, the only year for which the diary has survived. In that year the Austrian crown (containing 0.338 gram of gold) was worth £0.0416 or lOd (10 old pence), or 20 US cents; its present-day value would be about £2 or US $3.20.
By 1912 Handel-Mazzetti had come to the end of his time as an assistant in the University Botanical Institute in Vienna and was looking for another post His mother's diary for that year records the unsuccessful approaches to various influential persons that he made in the hope that a post might be created for him in the Natural History Museum. In July 1912 he was invited to accompany Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, on a motor tour through the Dolomites and to serve as his botanical guide. The details are recounted by Carl von Bardolff. (Bardolff, Carl Frh. von, Soldat im alien Osterreich; Erinneningen aus meinem Leben. Jena, 1938 [p. 126-127]).
The party set out from Toblach (now Dobbiaco) on a sunny morning at the beginning of July and drove up to the Falzarego pass.
"The car had to stop again and again. Handel-Mazzetti brought handfuls of rare and beautiful plants to the Archduke in the car, and the two [p.ix:] vied with one another in naming them as swiftly as they could. I was amazed at the depth of their knowledge ... Then the booty was sorted, labelled and stowed away in tin boxes ... And so the two of them continued their botanizing, ranging far from the road, on the mountainsides abave Andraz, Pieve and Arabba, and up to the Pordoi pass, which we reached long after midday ... The evening was spent in identifying the plants which they had previously been unable to name... Next day we drove over the Rolle pass ... through Fiera di Primiero, over the Brecon pass and via Trient to Riva ..."
On 8th July Heinrich wrote to his mother saying that all had gone well and that he hoped for good news before long. It seems reasonable to surmise that Heinrich seized the opportunity of speaking directly to the Archduke and of requesting him to create a post for him. However, Franz Ferdinand was a stem disciplinarian and would probably have regarded any such approach as impertinent. Even if he did not brusquely reject the young Handel-Mazze-tti's petition he certainly did not create the desired post. That is probably the reason why Handel-Mazzetti wrote in such derogatory terms of the Archduke in his book (Chapter 7), published thirteen years after the assassination at Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand was noted for his abrasiveness towards his inferiors. A recent commentator (Kann, Robert A., Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand Studien, Vienna 1976) remarks on his "inconsiderate harshness" and adds that "there were many who found him unacceptable, and some who hated and feared him".
In 1913 the Austro-Hungarian Dendrological Society, prompted by George Forrest's achievements in introducing shrubs and trees from Western China for cultivation in European gardens, decided to send Camillo Schneider, their General Secretary, to Yun-nan on a similar mission. To broaden the scope of the expedition the Academy of Sciences in Vienna suggested that Handel-Mazzetti should go with him, and offered financial support. Handel-Mazzetti, then 31 years old, had reached an impasse in his career as a taxonomic botanist at the Botanical Institute, and though he had previously shown no special interest in the Chinese flora he accepted the offer.
After landing at Haiphong, Handel-Mazzetti and Schneider travelled on the new railway to Yunnanfu (now Kunming) where they arrived in February 1914. Their first major journey took them northwards over the uplands and across the Yangtze (Jinsha Jiang) to Huili. After climbing Mount Lungju-shan (Longzhu Shan) they went up the valley of the Aiming He to Ningyuen (Xichang), and visited the "black Lolo" (Yi) in the Daliang Shan range where they found Rhododendron intricatum and R. denudatum. At the beginning of the rainy season in May they moved to Yenyuen (Yanyuan),
from which they visited the Lolo village of Kwapi (Guabi). They then travelled westwards via Yong-ning to Lijiang, where they met George ForresL Handel-Mazzetti spent only a short time on the Yulong Shan, the mountain range north of Lijiang, as he felt that its flora had been sufficiently explored. Nevertheless, he recognized its quality: "Our own alpine flora cannot match the splendours of this mountain, and my later travels in Yunnan convinced me that the Yulong Shan is ....unrivalled in its glory, both scenic and botanic. The work of Delavay, Forrest and Schneider ...has already yielded some 5000 species of flowering plants, ...almost as many as ...the entire Balkan peninsula".
Leaving Lijiang on 29th July he travelled northwest to the Chungtien (Zhongdian) range, visiting the sinter terraces at Bede on the way. On his journey he received news of the declaration of war. As it was now impossible for him to return to Europe the German consul advised him to carry on with his work in China, and thanks to the efforts of Richard von Wettstein, his chief and sponsor in Vienna, he continued to receive financial support until the end of his stay(3). He sent regular reports to the Academy of Sciences and kept a diary (see pages 53 and 172) which he used when writing Naturbilder aus Süd-West China. Unfortunately it is now no longer to be found. After spending the autumn in the mountains around Yanyuan, he returned to Kunming for the winter.
Early in 1915 Schneider left to take up a post in the USA. In February Handel-Mazzetti made a short trip to study the tropical flora near Manhao on the Red River south of Mengzi. At the end of April he set off on a major expedition. After passing through the territory explored by Delavay he spent a fortnight at Nguluke, Forrest's base at the foot of the Yulong-shan. He then crossed the Yangzi and visited the Chata Shan, though he did not reach its summit His next journey took him to Yongning and Muli, where he photographed a Buddhist temple. Travelling westwards towards Zhongdian, he climbed Gonshiga (4750m), the highest peak he ever [p.x:] attained, finally reaching the Mekong (Langcang Jiang) valley. It was now September, but he continued up the valley, where he found woods of arbor vitae (Thuja orientalis). After crossing the river by a rope bridge he arrived at the Tibetan village of Tsedjrong (Cizhong), where there was a Jesuit mission. From there he followed the pilgrim's route up to the Doker-la on the Tibetan frontier, and after a short rest at Londjre crossed the next divide to Bahan in the Salween (Nu Jiang) valley. At the end of September he returned over the Si-la (Xi-la) pass to the Mekong, and via Weihsi (Weixi) and Lidiping to Dali and Kunming.
The flora of the Salween valley had proved so rich that Handel-Mazzetti resolved to revisit it in 1916. At the end of April he set off to Dali, where he climbed the Gang Shan range to the west of the town. Civil war had broken out and he had to keep his plans secret, but he was able to travel up the Yangzi valley and cross the divide to the Mekong. Continuing over the Xi-la, he was again made welcome by the Jesuits at Bahan. From there he travelled over the Chiangshel pass to the upper Irrawaddy, which was much wetter than the Salween valley. After a period of rest and convalescence at Bahan, he travelled northwards to the Shenzu-la, climbed a limestone peak (Maya, 4574m) and made a high level circuit round the heads of the valleys draining into the Salween. On the return journey he resurveyed part of the Mekong valley and took a new route from Weixi over the hills to Jianchuan. Back at Nguluke in October, he met the American zoologist Roy Andrews and attempted one of Yulo-ng Shan's lesser peaks, but was forced to turn back at 4750m. After a further visit to the Yangxi gorge he returned via Yungbei (Yongsheng) to spend the winter in Kunming.
By 1917 Handel-Mazzetti had seen enough of the Yunnan highlands and decided to travel eastwards through Guizhou and Hunan, concentrating on subtropical areas at lower altitudes. He departed from Kunming on 5th June, leaving behind all his botanical collections packed in 51 tin-lined crates in the German consulate. Journeying across limestone karst terrain, he soon entered a part of Yunnan unsurveyed by any Westerner. The climate was warmer and wetter, and many of the plants were new to him, notably Bletilla yunnanensis and Lilium delavayi The strange cone hills of the karst landscape near Luoping made a deep impression on him. Crossing the Huangni He, he entered the province of Guizhou and on 27th June reached the city of Guiyang. Among the plants which he found in its vicinity were Hosta coerulea and Macleaya cordata. Travelling onwards in intense heat he reached Sandu and botanized in a boat along the Du Jiang river. Before long he entered Hunan province, where he was destined to spend the remainder of his stay in China. Near Xinning the aquatic flora was at its finest; he recorded lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) and several water lilies. China had now declared war on Germany, and Handel-Mazzetti decided to stay in Changsha, where there was a German community over twenty strong.
Despite the civil war he was able to continue collecting; the results were of considerable value because hardly any botanists had previously worked in Hunan. In 1918 he visited the antimony mines at Xikungshan; nearby he saw Pseudolarix kaempferi and three species of rose. He spent part of the summer in the hill forests of Mount Yun Shan. After the armistice had been signed he spent the winter in Changsha and was finally repatriated in 1919, though his herbarium specimens did not reach Vienna until 1922.
After his return from China in 1919 Handel-Mazzetti resumed his duties as an assistant in the University Botanical Institute. At that time there was a rule that no one might hold an assistant post for more than ten years without undergoing the process of "Habilitation", which entailed submitting a substantial dissertation and passing further examinations. Handel-Mazzetti had been an assistant since 1905, but did not wish to take this step because it would have involved him in teaching commitments towards which he felt no inclination. The nineteen-twenties were years of penury in Austria; academic posts were being axed or left unfilled, and it was not easy to find a position for Handel-Mazzetti where he could carry on his work as a taxonomist.
In Vienna there were, and still are, two centres of botanical study: the University Botanical Institute in the Rennweg, adjacent to the Botanical Garden, and the Department of Botany in the Natural History Museum, an imposing building on the Burgling. In 1922 the Director of the Department of Botany in the Natural History Museum was pensioned off and Karl von Keissler (4) was appointed in his stead. The second in the hierarchy, the Keeper (Kustos) — Dr K.H.Rechinger (5) senior, then only fifty-five years old — was compelled to take early retirement so as to create a vacancy. In April 1923 Handel-Mazzetti was transferred from the Botanical Institute to the Natural History Museum, still as a scientific assistant, and in June 1925 he was promoted to the vacant post of Keeper. Once again his first concern was the herbarium, but he also set about the task of reorganising [p.xi:] the entire Department of Botany, which had once been an outstanding centre of scientific excellence, though in the unhappy postwar years it had slipped into a sad state of decline. He took up the cudgels — perhaps too openly and uncompromisingly — against certain serious organisational shortcomings which had grown worse year by year with the demise of more and more of the genuine taxonomists, among then A. von Hayek, who accompanied Handel-Maizetti on a visit to the Thessalian Olympus in 1927. Unfortunately his ideas failed to find sympathy and support among those who controlled the destinies of the department His suggestions, though well-founded and reasonable, were considered inexpedient, his indiscreetly voiced opinions made enemies, and finally he came into open conflict with Keissler.
Although Handel-Mazzetti was averse to teaching — he regarded it as a waste of time that could better be devoted to taxonomic work — he was by no means devoid of ambition. He coveted academic honours and distinctions, and dreamed of stepping into Keissler's place as director. Keissler was a modest and unassuming man, perhaps somewhat afraid of Handel-Mazzetti, and some of his botanical research was not above criticism. Handel-Mazzetti seems to have naively supposed that by exposing Keissler's shortcomings he could curry favour with the authorities, induce them to dismiss Keissler and make him director. With this object in mind he published a review of a collection of plants brought back from Tibet by Zugmayer. These specimens had originally been studied and identified by Keissler in 1907. Handel-Mazzetti made no attempt to hide his disdain for Keissler's work:
"While working up the botanical material which I brought back from China I had occasion to inspect some of the plants collected by Zugmayer in North East Tibet, and it immediately struck me that they had not been correctly determined. .... I resolved to undertake a revision of the entire collection. This revealed that out of the species determined by the author himself [Keissler] ...32 were wrongly named ..."
He goes on to review the species one by one and seems to revel in pillorying Keissler's mistakes:
"The author described the flowers [of Braya uniflora] as still unknown, but they had already been described and illustrated in Hooker's Icones (1894)."
A few pages later he reclassifies an aster which Keissler had regarded as no more than a new variety and gives it specific rank as Aster glandulosus (Keissl.) Hand.-Mzt, discarding Keissler's epithet, relegating Keissler's name to parentheses and ap pending his own.
The quarrel came to a head in 1929, before Handel-Mazzetti's review had appeared. His obituarist maintains a discreet silence, but Professor K.H.Rechinger junior takes up the story in a letter to his parents written on 29th September 1929:
"Yesterday Schaffer [F.X.Schaffer, 1876-1953, Director of the Department of Geology and Palaeontology in the Natural History Museum] told me how he had encountered Handel-Mazzetti on the day after his return from America. According to Schaffer, Handel-Mazzetti is completely crazy. His arrogance, self-importance and quarrelsomeness have become notorious, in America as well as here. By his behaviour towards Keissler Handel-Mazzetti has made himself intolerable, and he no longer sets foot in the Museum.
Today, as I was sitting in a restaurant peacefully enjoying my luncheon, my gaze, drawn by some magic force, lighted upon a table in the window. There sat Handel-Mazzetti himself, as large as life, seemingly eating his meal with a good appetite despite everything. We nodded to one another, and during a break hi the meal I went over to his table. His greeting was friendly and he was less taciturn than usual. Speaking so fast that his words tumbled over each other, he at once began to pour out the story of the affair from his point of view. I did not understand everything, but his main complaints were that Keissler's faults stank to high heaven and that he was furious at having to put up with him as his superior for another five years although he, Handel-Mazzetti, had been promised the Directorship of the Department of Botany as long ago as 1924."
The affair was handled with great discretion and the details never became public. However, there were rumours that Handel-Mazzetti had threatened Keissler with violence and had actually attempted to strike him. He was immediately suspended from his duties and forbidden to enter the Natural History Museum. In due course he was obliged to submit to examination by a psychiatrist After considering the medical report the authorities compelled Handel-Mazzetti to take early retirement and he relinquished his post on 1st July 1931. Under the regulations in force at the time his pension would have been 80 per cent of his salary. However, his salary would have been meagre, first because he would have been below the ceiling that he could have reached in the later stages of a successful career and secondly because academics were in any case poorly paid. Even as late as 1963 the salary of a Kustos in the Naturhistorisches Museum was only one third of that [p.xii:] of a Keeper in the British Museum (Natural History) in London.
Handel-Mazzetti, still less than fifty years old, now found himself free from all official duties and able to devote all his time to research. A place was found for him in the Botanical Institute in the Rennweg, where he was given a corner in the herbarium. After a time he began to find the accommodation too cramped and the ban on entering the Natural History Museum became increasingly irksome. The library at the Rennweg did not take all the journals he required and above all he needed access to the Natural History Museum so as to compare his plants from China with the type specimens in the herbarium. After a few years a compromise was negotiated: the ban on entering the Natural History Museum was lifted, and a timetable was devised to avoid any contact between the adversaries. Keissler used to leave the Museum punctually at 2 pm and Handel-Mazzetti, having spent the morning at the Botanical Institute, arrived a few minutes later(6).
For the rest of the thirties Handel-Mazzetti was free to concentrate his vast energies on the mass of botanical material which he had collected in China and which had been shipped back, soldered up in airtight tin-boxes, after the war. He published the results under the title "Symbolae Sinicae" (1929-1937). The first five parts deal with algae, fungi, lichens, mosses and liverworts, and were written by specialists, but Parts VI (ferns) and Vn (flowering plants; 1450 pages) were mainly his own work. His own herbarium material from China comprised over thirteen thousand specimens, and he included in his studies a number of plants collected by others. Many of the plants listed in Symbolae Sinicae had not previously been found in China. Out of the 8015 species dealt with, no fewer than 1307 were new, and there were 35 new genera. He had already published many of these new discoveries as "Plantae novae Sinenses" in the Anzeiger of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna from 1920 to 1926.
He used Symbolae Sinicae as a vehicle for critical comments and revisions of various genera; his account of Chinese oaks, for example, runs to twenty pages, and his researches extended to the collections in Berlin, Edinburgh, Kew and Paris. Yet Symbolae Sinicae is a disappointingly uninfor-mative work: for most species, apart from new discoveries, the entry gives only the name, the reference to the original description and a list of the places in China where specimens had been collected.
Some of his investigations of Chinese plants led him to undertake separate revisions of certain genera (Androsace, Lysimachia, Ligularia), culminating in a monograph on his old favourite Leontopodium (1927 — 172 pages). As a leading expert on the Chinese flora he received several invitations to study collections made by other travellers. These labours are recorded in Plantae Mellianae, Plantae Chingian-ae, Plantae Tsiangianae, in his contributions to Plantae Sinenses a Dre. H. Smith lectae and numerous lesser works. In the late thirties he embarked on a large-scale flora of China and had completed much of the preliminary work, but after his death there was no one with the necessary experience to bring it to fruition.
Handel-Mazzetti's scientific achievements found due recognition in his own country and abroad. In 1928 he was invited by the Royal Horticultural Society to read a. paper at the Fourth Primula Conference in London (The Natural Habitats of Chinese Primulas. J. Roy. Hort. Soc. 54, 51-62, 1929) and became an honorary member of the Society. He was also an honorary member of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (1934) and a corresponding member of the Societe Botanique de Geneve, and he was awarded the Silver Nightingale Medal of the Geographical Society in Berlin. In 1939 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, but he died before the appointment had been confirmed by the Ministry in Berlin.
Since the scientific tasks that Handel-Mazzetti set himself vastly exceeded the powers of a single individual, prodigious as was his capacity for work, he enlisted a succession of scientific helpers to carry out special investigations under his direction and constant supervision. Unmarried and without family responsibilities — he lived as a subtenant in a simply furnished room — his pension, supplemented by the sale of duplicates from his personal collection of herbarium material, was sufficient to allow him to pay a reasonable salary to his private assistant and also to meet the expense of a walking tour in the Alps every summer. Despite his personal reserve and aloofness from social life — his brothers were practically the only persons to whom he displayed any warmth — all his personal assistants were devoted to him. Among them were Dr Wilhelm Mack, Dr Theodor Just (subsequently Professor at Notre Dame University, Indiana, USA), Dr Lotte Kretschmer, Dr Georg Kufodontis and Dr FJfriede Peter, nee Stibal, who worked with him for several years and was perhaps more closely acquainted with him than any of the others.
During these years he sponsored several students from China. Among his family's photographs is one of a bespectacled young man in European dress, inscribed in German "to my most respected teacher Dr Handel-Mazzetti, with friendly memories from Yin Yuan Pai 1936-1939."
Because hardly any of his letters or personal papers have survived, it is not easy to assess his [p.xiii:] contacts with other botanists and plant hunters who worked in China in the same era. He describes his meetings with George Forrest at Nguluke (Chapters 7 and 13). There is no record of any meeting with Frank Kingdon Ward. He was serving in India while Handel-Mazzetti was in China and when Handel-Mazzetti came to London for the Primula Conference in May 1928 Kingdon Ward was in Burma (see his book "Plant Hunting on the Edge of the World", p.65). However, Kingdon Ward refers to correspondence with him. In his article "The Snow Mountains of Yunnan" ( Geog. Journ. 1924, 64, 222-231) he writes...." (Handel-Mazzetti's) height of 5900m (later 5815m) for Satseto was obtained by photogrammet-ric construction over Lidjiang 3340m". In May 1921 Handel-Mazzetti received a visit from the Swedish botanist Karl August Harald (Harry) Smith. The latter was on his way to Peking to start the first of his three expeditions, and wanted to meet Handel-Mazzetti and see his collections, though he must have been disappointed to find that most of the material was still held up by the Chinese. In 1922 Harry Smith travelled the route from Kunming via. Ningyuan that Handel-Mazzetti and Schneider had followed on their first journey in 1914, but he was less fortunate: on the way to Chengtu he was attacked and robbed, losing 1000 herbarium sheets. He never went back to Yunnan or traversed any other of Handel-Mazzetti's routes(7). Handel-Mazzetti met Joseph Rock when the latter made a short visit to Vienna in the winter of 1933-34. In her biography of Rock, Stephanne Sutton(8) describes how "they sat together in the dining room at the Hotel Sacher over Naturschnitzel and conversed amiably".
From time to time there was talk of another visit to China, but in the twenties no funds were available. In the thirties Hermann Sleumer invited Handel-Mazzetti to join him on a trip to China but their plans were wrecked by the war.
The end came unexpectedly. At dusk on 30th January 1940, as he was crossing the Rennweg after leaving the Botanical Institute, he was knocked down in the blackout by a German military vehicle. He was taken to hospital with multiple rib fractures and severe lung injuries, and died of an embolus at 6pm on 1st February. Only two hours earlier, fully expecting to recover, he had given Janchen, his obituarist, a detailed account of the accident.
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Janchen concludes the obituary with a sketch of Handel-Mazzetti's personality:
Handel-Mazzetti was tall and powerfully built. His features were distinguished, his bearing erect and military, and his address confident and direct, though never assertive. His intellectual talents would have fitted him for a career in any walk of life, but his interests were so narrowly focused on plant taxonomies and phytogeography that there was little room in his life for anything else. Nevertheless, it was this concentration on a single field of research, coupled with his tireless industry, that made possible his huge output of scientific writing. Everything that he produced was thorough and reliable, totally free from carelessness or superficiality. However, when he found neglectful errors in other botanists' work he castigated them severely. In his personal dealings he was irreproachably honest and straightforward, and never let himself be influenced by considerations of personal advantage. He had a strong sense of justice and was a shrewd judge of character. His assessments of his fellows were sometimes severe, but usually accurate, and he had no patience with weakness or idle compromises. His was a fighter's nature and he never shirked conflict or danger. In his relations with his colleagues he maintained a dignified reserve. Closer social contact was reserved for his family, and even here it was kept within narrow limits, for his working hours were sacrosanct Yet withal he was not unduly earnest; he had a cheerful temperament and was not without a sense of humour.
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Handel-Mazzetti certainly felt at his best out of doors, high in the mountains, especially in his beloved Tyrol. For a large part of his childhood and youth he lived in Innsbruck and spent many summer holidays at the family farmhouse at Vols, a few kilometres west of the city. Later he never failed to pay an annual visit to his mother in her home in Tyrol, and to the end of his life he enjoyed walking tours in the Austrian Alps with rucksack and iceaxe. Because of his wide experience of botanical work under field conditions he was invited to write the chapter entitled "Der Ökologe auf Reisen" [The Ecologist on an Expedition] (1928) for Abderhaldens Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsmethoden A contemporary photograph shows him on a mountain path near Kals in 1938 [frontispiece]. His love for these mountains and their flowers led him to champion the cause of nature conservation, most notably when the Gamsgrube on the Pasterzenflanke (Upper Carinthia), famous for its unique flora, was [p.xiv:] threatened by commercial exploitation(9). Yet he was far from fanatical; in a note published when he was only twenty-six [Mitteilungen des Dtsch. u. Ost Alpenvereins, 1908, p.35-36] he rebuts the protests levelled against a colleague who dug up 20-30 plants of Wulfenia carinthiaca for cultivation in a botanic garden. "As anyone familiar with Wulfenia in its habitat will realise, there is no danger of its extermination." He remarked that it was important not to make conservation seem ridiculous or to provoke hostility. He adds an amusing story. One day he was walking through the woods on the limestone hills near Perchtoldsdorf south of Vienna. On the ridge of the Fohrenberg he came across a boulder on which were growing: Erinus alpinus from the Western Alps and the Jura, Erigeron alpinus from the Central and Western limestone Alps, Dianthus alpinus and Vemnica tiuticans, both found on the Schneeberg.
"This community would deceive nobody;" he writes, "one would at most smile at the 'eccentric fellow ' that planted them there. But suppose they died out, as they sooner or later will, leaving only D. alpinus. It might then be mistaken for a preglacial relict"
His command of languages comprised Italian, learnt from his mother, French (sufficient to converse with missionaries in China), English (he delivered a lecture to the Royal Horticultural Society) and Latin, spoken as well as botanical. By 1916 he claimed to speak Chinese well enough for the everyday needs of travel.
He was a competent draughtsman, as the drawings in his monograph on Taraxacum attest, but the only sketch in Naturbilder aus Sudwest China [Chapter 25] is somewhat uninspiring. He devoted much effort to photography, but his pictures, both those reproduced in the book and those in the archives of the Botanical Institute (nearly 2000), are disappointing. At that time the standards of photography in black and white were scarcely inferior to those achieved today, though emulsions were not as fast Some of the plant photographs taken by his contemporary in China (reproduced in J. Macqueen Cowan, The Journeys and Plant Introductions of George Forrest, Oxford, 1952) could hardly be bettered today. Yet Handel-Mazzetti's pictures of plant life are spoilt by lack of skill in composition. Instead of trying to portray a single plant, he aimed his camera at a mass of vegetation and captioned the plate with a list of species; the result is a confused and jumbled image. Most of his landscape photographs are equally unsatisfactory, and even after making due allowance for the difficulty of obtaining photographic plates hi good condition in wartime China and for the problems caused by mist and rain, it has to be said that Handel-Mazzetti was not a talented photographer.
He was a botanist pure and simple and had no interest in horticulture. He never had a garden of his own, nor did he ever have any duties in the Botanic Garden in Vienna. When giving his paper on "The Natural Habitats of Chinese Primulas" at the Royal Horticultural Society's Fourth Primula Conference in 1928, he began with the words "... as a systematic botanist I know about as much of gardening as a zoologist as such knows of horsemanship." Though he says in his foreword that he had tried to outline his observations in other fields of knowledge, and he certainly did valuable work in geography and geology, he has practically nothing to say about birds or mammals, and when he met the American scientists from the American Museum of Natural History he was naively surprised at their success in trapping small nocturnal mammals on Mount Yulong Shan.
Several passages in "Naturbilder aus Südwest China" seem to betray an intolerant and censorious personality. He makes gratuitously unkind remarks about some of the people he met in China — for instance, the British consul in Kunming who "was alleged to have gone there because of an excessive fondness for alcohol." On hearing of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo — a man he had known personally and who, had his chauffeur not taken a wrong turning and thus enabled Gavrilo Princip to take steady aim at the Crown Prince, would have become Handel-Mazzetti's sovereign — all he could find to say was that "it was fortunate that he never came to the throne" — an uncalled for comment that leaves a bitter taste even today (Chapter 7). He also reveals that he was a convinced pacifist, though he did not try to evade call up for military service, and a rabid nonsmoker.
He lived a celibate life and seems never to have been in love. As Professor K.H. Rechinger remarked to me, had he ever had a liaison with a woman it would not have remained a secret for long, Vienna being the city it is!
His obituarist, writing in 1940 when Austria had just been swallowed up into 'Greater Germany ' and Vienna was virtually under occupation by the Wehr-macht, tells us that Handel-Mazzetti regarded himself as entirely German and that he showed no external signs of his Italian blood. That is not to say that he had any sympathy with the Nazis; on the contrary, so Professor Rechinger assured me, he wanted nothing to do with them. Janchen goes on to say that Handel-Mazzetti was free from any aristocratic pride or snobbery: his attitudes and sentiments were socially conscious and democratic. He adds that his helpfulness was known to all who had dealings [p.xv:] with him. As one of his juniors, Professor Rechinger formed a somewhat different impression:
"I would have liked nothing belter than to have learnt from him, but Handel-Mazzetti, without saying much, had a way of repelling any friendly overtures."
This biographical memoir may fittingly be concluded by a character sketch written by Professor Rechinger in 1944, when he was living in the country outside Vienna in circumstances of some hardship. Having time on his hands, he sat down with pencil and paper and drafted short vignettes of some of the leading botanists of the day. Forty-two years later he looked out the exercise book in which he had written it, and with his permission I reproduce it below:
Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti
His appearance, his gait and his movements were, like his handwriting, stiffly erect, angular and ungainly. A long face framed by a prematurely grey beard, the skull brachycephalic, the eyes blue, their gaze somewhat shifting; his bearing autocratic and haughty; his address plain-spoken, often offensive, even aggressive. Though motivated by a genuine love of nature, he was also propelled by a no less powerful egoism. The latter was so overwhelming that in time it gradually undermined his entire personality, although his mind had originally been as vigorous and robust as his body. In his unconscious mind he must have felt that the recognition that he longed for and the influence that he sought to exercise were goals which he could attain only by single-minded concentration on his work. Yet even in his circumscribed field of research, which he pursued to the exclusion of amusements or diver-sions of any kind— forswearing even the most basic human relationships — his was not an effortless or enjoyable creativity but a burdensome and unremitting toil, made more laborious by stem self-criticism. The volume and importance of his published writings bear witness to his unceasing industry, his iron constitution and a degree of single-mindedness bordering on asceticism. His scientific papers are lucid and well set out; they display a clear sense of form and a proper feeling for natural affinities, but they are sometimes marred by forced attempts to draw artificial distinctions.
I can see him still, sailing along in his battered old hat, his loden cloak floating in the wind, maintaining his course and speed regardless of his surroundings, and I can well imagine how it came about that, driven on by his almost pathological selfconfidence, he strode on to his destruction — 'where I am, no other man can be'— unwilling to the very last to accept that Fate could lay her hand on his shoulder before he had brought his ambitious plans to fruition. A glance at the portrait of Keissler is enough to show that any compromise or understanding between two such contrasting personalities was out of the question, especially when the stronger was subordinated to the weaker.
The first edition and its reviews
Naturbilder aus Südwest China - Erlebnisse und Eindrücke eines österreichischen Forchers während des Weltkrieges — by Dr Heinrich Handel-Mazzetti, Custos an der botanischen Abteilung des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien. Pp. xiv+ 380+77 plates. With a map and 148 illustrations from the author's photographs, including 24 Autochromes. 1927, Osterreichischer Bundesverlag für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst, Wien und Leipzig. Price 24 Reichsmarks.
The first edition was published in purple cloth with a handsome floral motif on the cover. It is now a very scarce book.
Most of the reviewers treated it kindly. Writing in "Nature", Augustine Henry remarked on "the wealth and beauty of the illustrations". Noting its "strong appeal to horticulturists", he expressed the hope that a translation would soon be published. (Nature, May 7, 1927, 119, 667-668). "L.D.S.", writing in the Geographical Journal (1927, 70, 300), praised the colour plates, but commented that "a generalised account of the vegetation of China from the ecological standpoint is still a desideratum." The anonymous reviewer in La Geographic (1927, 47, 475) was less gracious: "On pourrait cependant regretter de trouver ... des appreciations peu courtois-es a I'adresse de personnes des pays allies avec lesquelles I'auteur fut en relation." In Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen (1928, 74, 54), Tiefsen, while welcoming Handel-Mazzetti's descriptions of geological formations, noted that his geological experience could not be expected to equal his botanical knowledge. Another critic remarked that although Handel-Mazzetti had not formed a very favourable opinion of the Chinese, he nevertheless nearly always enjoyed protection and support from the authorities and lodging and hospitality from the people (Mitt. Geog. Gesell. München, 1927, 20, 143).
(1) Erwin Janchen (1882-1970) Austrian botanist; pupil of Richard von Wettstein; Dr phil 1907; 1905-1920 at Univ. Botanisches Institut, Vienna; 1920-1923 at Bundesanstalt für Pflanzenschutz, from 1923 at Botanisches Institut. Editor of Osterr. hot. Zeitschrift 1931-1944.
(2) Karl Heinz Rechinger junior, born 1906; Dr phil 1931; plant taxonomist and phytogeographer; Head of Dept. of Botany and later Director-General of the Natural History Museum, Vienna. Author of Flora Aegaea and Flora Iranica.
(3) Handel-Mazzetti was financed by the Academy of Sciences in Vienna and the following payments are publicly recorded in the Anzeiger der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien: 2nd June 1913 Crowns 14000 10th July 1914 3000 19th March 1915 6000 24th February 1916 6000 29th March 1917 4000 31st January 1918 6000 11th July 1919 12000 "to cover the costs of bringing home his botanical collections" 11th July 1919 3500 "to print his map of the Chinese river system" Total Crowns 54500
In 1914 100 Austrian crowns were worth about £4.20 sterling or $21 US, but the value dropped with inflation towards the end of the war.
(4) Karl von Keissler 1872-1965, lichenologist. Dr. phil. 1895. Botanical Garden, Vienna 1895-1899. Department of Botany, Natural History Museum, Vienna 1899-1938.
(5) Karl H. Rechinger senior (1867-1952). Austrian botanist; studied under Wettstein; Dr phil 1893; demonstrator and later assistant at the University Botanic Garden, Vienna, 1893-1902; in various posts in the Natural History Museum 1902-1922, from 1919 as Kustos of the Department of Botany. Father of Professor K.H. Rechinger.
(6) In his obituary Janchen states that Handel-Mazzetti spent the mornings in the Museum and the afternoons in the Botanical Institute, but Professor K.H.Rechinger, who worked there in the thirties, says that Janchen was mistaken.
(7) Herner, G. Taxon, 1988, 37, 299-308.
(8) Stephanne B. Sutton In China's Border Provinces — The Turbulent Career of Joseph Rock, Botanist— Explorer. 1974, Hastings House, New York.
(9) Gams, Helmut — Cart Schröter und Heinrich von Handel-Mazzetti — Jahrb. d. Vereins z. Schutze d. Alp.-pfl. u. Tiere, 1940, 12, 63-70.