Ethelbert Blatter

Ethelbert Blatter (15 December 1877 – 26 May 1934) was a Swiss Jesuit priest and pioneering botanist in British India. Blatter was born in the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden in Switzerland. Blatter went to high school in Schwyz and afterwards he moved to the border town of Feldkirch in Austria, joining the Jesuits. Blatter went to the Netherlands in 1898, studying classics and philosophy. He also developed interest in botany and attended scientific conferences in Europe. Blatter moved to India in 1903, where he was appointed Professor of Botany at St. Xavier’s College Bombay. He traveled extensively through India and wrote an important series of articles between 1904 and 1909, entitled The Palms of British India and Ceylon, Indigenous and Introduced. In 1909 Blatter came back to Europe, completing his theological studies in Hastings, South England. Ordained as a priest in 1912, Blatter lived a year in the Netherlands, before returning to London. When the Great War (1914-1919) broke out, Blatter moved from London to India, arriving in Bombay in October 1915. As professor of botany at St Xavier’s, Blatter built an extensive botanical collection. In 1925 Blatter retired and began to focus more on his botanical studies. He wrote amongst others Some Beautiful Indian Trees (1925), Beautiful Flowers of Kashmir (1927, 1928) and The Ferns of Bombay (1932). After a bad fall from a horse in 1930, his health began to fail. In 1932 Blatter received the first Johannes Bruehl Memorial Medal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for “Conspicuous Important contributions to the knowledge of Asiatic Botany.” Blatter died on 26 May 1934 at St. Vincent’s High School, Pune