page_title: Lichenology
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Lichenology / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: Erik Acharius, Swedish botanist, the father of lichenology
context_page_description: Lichenology is the branch of mycology that studies the lichens, symbiotic organisms made up of an intimate symbiotic association of a microscopic alga with a filamentous fungus.
  Study of lichens draws knowledge from several disciplines: mycology, phycology, microbiology and botany. Scholars of lichenology are known as lichenologists.
context_section_description: Against this background appeared the Swedish botanist Erik Acharius disciple of Linnaeus, who is today considered the father of lichenology, starting the taxonomy of lichens with his pioneering study of Swedish lichens in Lichenographiae Suecicae Prodromus of 1798 or in his Synopsis Methodica Lichenum, Sistens omnes hujus Ordinis Naturalis of 1814. These studies and classifications are the cornerstone of subsequent investigations. In these early years of structuring the new discipline various works of outstanding scientific importance appeared such as Lichenographia Europaea Reformata published in 1831 by Elias Fries or Enumeratio Critico Lichenum Europaeorum 1850 by Ludwig Schaerer in Germany.
   But these works suffer from being superficial and mere lists of species without further physiological studies. It took until the middle of the 19th century for research to catch up using biochemical and physiological methods. In Germany Ernst Itzigsohn and Johann Bayrhoffer, in France Edmond Tulasne and Camille Montagne, in Russia Fedor Buhse, in England William Allport Leighton and in the United States Edward Tuckerman began to publish works of great scientific importance.
  Scientific publications settled many unknown facts about lichens. In the French publication Annales des Sciences Naturelles in an article of 1852 "Memorie pour servir a l'Histoire des Lichens Organographique et Physiologique" by Edmond Tulasne, the reproductive organs or apothecia of lichens was identified.
  These new discoveries were becoming increasingly contradictory for scientists. The apothecium reproductive organ being unique to fungi but absent in other photosynthetic organisms. With improvements in microscopy, algae were identified in the lichen structure, which heightened the contradictions. At first the presence of algae was taken as being due to contamination due to collection of samples in damp conditions and they were not considered as being in a symbiotic relation with the fungal part of the thallus. That the algae continued to multiply showed that they were not mere contaminants.
  
  It was Anton de Bary a German mycologist who specialised in phytopathology who first suggested in 1865 that lichens were merely the result of parasitism of various fungi of the ascomycetes group by nostoc type algae and others. Successive studies such as those carried out by Andrei Famintsyn and Baranetzky in 1867 showed no dependence of the algal component upon the lichen thallus and that the algal component could live independently of the thallus. It was in 1869 that Simon Schwendener demonstrated that all lichens were the result of fungal attack on the cells of algal cells and that all these algae also exist free in nature. This researcher was the first to recognise the dual nature of lichens as a result of the capture of the algal component by the fungal component. In 1873 Jean-Baptiste Edouard Bornet concluded form studying many different lichen species that the relationship between fungi and algae was purely symbiotic. It was also established that algae could associate with many different fungi to form different lichen phenotypes.
caption: Erik Acharius (1757–1819), Swedish botanist, the father of lichenology
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