Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus

Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776 to 1837) was a German medical doctor and naturalist who was born and died in Bremen. He studied medicine at the University of Göttingen, took his doctor's degree in 1796 and the next year became professor of medicine and mathematics at the Bremen Lyceum. In 1816 he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His multivolume Biologie, oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur, begun in 1802, set out a theory of the transmutation of species of the kind held by some biologists before Darwin, in the same year that Lamarck voiced similar opinions. In the 1830s he used the microscope to identify the rod photoreceptor cells of the retina. His younger brother Ludolph Christian Treviranus was also a naturalist and botanist.