Obituary Peter Arnold Florschütz (1923-1976)

On 27 May 1976 Peter Arnold Florschütz, bryologist, died at the age of only 53 at De Bilt, Netherlands. Only six weeks prior he had been hospitalized as a result of kidney cancer. His untimely death came as totally unexpected and shocking news to his friends and colleagues all over the world, many of whom had seen him in excellent health the year before at the Botanical Congress in Leningrad. He was a lector of botany and curator of the cryptogamic herbarium at the Institute for Systematic Botany and acting director of the Botanical Gardens of the University of Utrecht, the same institution where he had studied biology from 1941 to 1949. In his professional capacity he had held positions at the Institute for Systematic Botany from 1946 until 1949 as student-assistant and from 1949 on as staff member. Initially under the directorship of his teacher in plant systematics Professor A. A. Pulle, and from 1948 until 1970 under Professor J. Lanjouw’s leadership, the “Flora of Suriname” was being tackled by the staff of the institute. Thus, as a young graduate student, Florschütz was assigned the revision of the mosses of Suriname; a comprehensive and difficult task, because in those post-war years there was a vacuum in European exotic bryology. The heydays, with Herzog in Germany, Brotherus in Scandinavia, Dixon in Great Britain and Thériot and Camus in France were over. At the beginning, Florschütz was entirely dependent on Brotherus’ treatment of the world’s mosses in Engler and Prantl, “Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien.” In those years he had run over the leaves of this book for weeks on end in a typical posture, like he used to tell: folded in a chair, book on his lap.