EHRENBERG, CHRISTIAN GOTTFRIED. - German physician and naturalist, b. at Delitzsch (Leipzig), 19 April 1795, d. at Berlin, 27 June 1876. He undertook natural-history expeditions in Africa and Asia.
He was one of the most versatile and profound naturalists of the nineteenth century; he was the first to describe the nerve cell and the structure of the spinal cord; he discovered the causes of the phosphorescence of the sea and drew attention to the prodigious reproductive power of diatoms and to the expansion of microscopic life.
Geochemistry has in him a precursor. In his microgeological studies of the smallest living forms in the depths of the sea, E. took a position with regard to evolutionism, which he regarded as an unprovable hypothesis.
BIBLI: Works: Organisation, Systematik und geograph. Verhältnis der Infuzionstierchen, Berlin 1830; Mikrogeologische Studien über das kleinste Leben der Meeres Tiefgrande aller Zonen und dessen geologischen Einfluss, in Abhandlungen der König. Akademie d. Wiss., ibid. 1872, pp. 131-309. Biographical data: E. Hanstein, Allgem. deutsche Biographie, V, 705 ff.; W. Wernadsky, La géochimie, Paris 1924, pp. 267-72. Luigi Screnia