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English translation of Heinrich Anton de Bary’s 1878 speech, ‘Die Erscheinung der Symbiose’ (‘De la symbiose’)

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Abstract

Die Erscheinung der Symbiose, meaning “the phenomenon of symbiosis” in English or “de la symbiose” in French, is a transcription of the 1878 lecture by the German botanist and mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary in which he first used the term ‘symbiosis’ in a biological context. De Bary’s speech was published in 1879 in German, later to be translated into French; though only fragments of his speech are available in English. Translating de Bary’s lecture is timely because the field of symbiosis, especially with respect to microorganisms, is expanding and the importance of symbiosis is now recognized across the biological sciences. Researchers have now begun to sort through the early literature to uncover original thoughts pertaining to symbiotic interactions. We believe that having de Bary’s lecture accessible to researchers in English will help enhance interest in the history of symbioses, document de Bary’s pioneering contribution, and aid in establishing an understanding for whom the lecture was intended and when biological symbioses were first recognized. We present a short biography of Heinrich Anton de Bary, a full translation of his lecture, and conclude by briefly highlighting current endeavors in symbiosis research.

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Notes

  1. We have not translated the numerous footnotes that are in the German but not in the French version, since they were not part of the original talk.

  2. The following text, the end of which will be marked by another footnote, was only in the German, but not in the French translation.

  3. This is the end of the text that is present in the German, but not in the French, text.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for financial support, Dr. William Martin (University of Düsseldorf, Germany) for obtaining a difficult-to-get original French version of de Bary’s speech, and Dr. David Richardson (Saint Mary’s University, Canada) for providing critical comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tyler J. Carrier.

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Oulhen, N., Schulz, B.J. & Carrier, T.J. English translation of Heinrich Anton de Bary’s 1878 speech, ‘Die Erscheinung der Symbiose’ (‘De la symbiose’). Symbiosis 69, 131–139 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13199-016-0409-8

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