Adolph Hansen

Karl Adolph Hansen (1851 in Hamburg – 1920 in Giessen) was a German botanist. He graduated in 1887 at the University of Würzburg on a thesis entitled "Geschichte der Assimilation und Chlorophyllfunktion" (supervised by Julius Sachs). He was professor of botany at the Justus Liebig-Universität Gießen 1891-1920. He had very broad academic interests, including history and archaeology. However, he always worked alone, supervised very few doctoral students (4 in 39 years), and stood outside the development of experimental physiological botany among his contemporaries. Hansen wrote scholarly works on Goethe's ''Metamorphosis of Plants'' and had an aggressive dispute over this hypothesis with Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Provided by Wikipedia