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August Otto Theodor Tellkampf |
b. Heinde, Germany, 27 April 1812; d.
Hannover, Germany, 7 September 1883
In 1838 he received a doctorate in Medicine from the University of
Wurzburg, Bavaria, and immigrated into the Unites States in 1839, where he
practiced medicine in Cleveland and New York. He ‘Americanized’ his
name by adding either ‘A.’ or ‘G.’ as his middle initial. He had some
interests in cave fauna, having visited Mammoth Cave in October 1842 (Tellkampf
1844a,b), and described several species of invertebrates. He was a
member of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York (Romero 2001b).
Tellkampf contributed detailed descriptions of A. spelaea
and in complete agreement with his American colleagues, he concluded that
its eyes and that of other blind cave fauna had become rudimentary as a
result of disuse: ‘While it is true, in general, that all animals retain
their essential form, and that no species passes over into another by
transformation, we know that less material changes of form are produced by
external influences such as changes in climate or food, lasting though
many generations of the same species’. However, he was not that sure
about which one was the unmodified species that by means of purely
environmental influences had 'produced' the blind cave one. For him
the relationship of the blind fauna to its original eyed one could not be
settled until ‘such species, corresponding with them in all essential
points, are found’ (Tellkampf 1844b: 393). |
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