Ferdinand Christian Gustav Arnold

Ferdinand Christian Gustav Arnold was born in 1828 in Ansbach (Bavaria, Germany). He studied jurisprudence in München and Heidelberg and worked as a lawyer, between 1857 and 1877 in Eichstätt and from 1877 to 1896 in München. F. Arnold devoted all his spare time to floristics and taxonomy of plants and fungi. As a student of F. P. von Martius and O. Sendtner, he first studied vascular plants. Later, he focused his interest to bryophytes and lichens. His monograph of the lichens of Tyrolia, entitled Lichenologische Ausflüge in Tirol, is still a major source of information for alpine lichenology.

In 1878, F. Arnold was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of München and was one of the founder members of the Bayerische Botanische Gesellschaft. He published some 140 contributions (for references consult DALI).

F. Arnold was a prolific editor of lichen exsiccatae; within five series he distributed some three thousand exsiccatal units. Furthermore, he assigned many of his precious collections to other exsiccatae: e. g. bryophytes to Rabenhorst, Bryoth. Eur. and Winter, Rabenhorstii Bryoth. Eur., fungi to Rehm, Ascomyc. and vascular plants to Schultz, Herb. Norm. and Schultz, Herb. Norm. Nov. Ser. The small series Arnoldia is devoted to him.

In 1901, Arnold died in München. His herbarium (c. 120,000 lichen specimens and 30,000 specimens from other plant and fungus groups, e.g. lichenicolous fungi) is now housed at the Botanische Staatssammlung München (M). Currently more than 1,000 specimens of lichenicolous fungi collected by F. Arnold are presented on the internet via searchable web interface.