Karl Ernst von Baer

Karl Ernst von Baer was born on 28 February 1792 — 17 February by the Julian calendar then in force — at Piibe manor in Koeru parish, Järvamaa. The place lies today in Piibe village, Väike-Maarja Parish, Lääne-Viru County, which is why some sources put his birth in Järvamaa and others in Lääne-Virumaa without either being wrong. Piibe belonged to the Baers from the 1750s until the land reform of 1919, and from 1834 to 1866 Karl Ernst owned it himself.

His father, Johann Magnus von Baer (1765–1825), was head of the Estonian knighthood and later a Landrat. His mother, Juliane Louise von Baer (1764–1820), was his father’s own first cousin; they married in 1787 at Vohnja manor. The family itself came from Westphalia: an ancestor, Heinrich Baer, is attested as a citizen and householder in Reval between 1555 and 1584, and it was only on 20 November 1749, at Vienna, that the line was granted the style “Edler von Huthorn” with an improved coat of arms — on which there stands a bear.

The small boy was given away. He spent his first years at Lasila, in the childless household of his father’s elder brother Carl Heinrich von Baer (1763–1814); the aunt, Baroness Ernestine von Canne of Coburg, is the one who kept him. Who exactly took him in is told three ways: the German and English sources name the uncle, the Estonian local ones say he was given “to the family of his childless aunt”, and the Väike-Maarja Museum — the institution nearest the sites — says he spent his first seven years at Lasila with his grandmother. He was brought back to Piibe at seven — Estonian sources say more precisely at seven and a half.

And here is the thing about that childhood that stands out most. Kholodkovsky’s Russian life of Baer says it flatly: as a boy of seven Baer not only could not read, he did not know a single letter. Twelve years later he was a medical student at the University of Dorpat. In August 1807 he was brought to the cathedral school in Reval — the Ritter- und Domschule, first mentioned in 1319 — where the director questioned him and put him straight into the top class, requiring him to attend the lower ones only for Greek. He later called those three years in Reval the poetic time of his life.

Eesti Entsüklopeedia: Baer, Karl Ernst von · ADB: Baer, Karl Ernst Ritter von · N. Kholodkovsky, «Карл Бэр. Его жизнь и научная деятельность» (Karl Baer: his life and scientific work; in Russian) · Väike-Maarja vald: Karl Ernst von Baer

In August 1810, aged eighteen, Baer entered the Imperial University of Dorpat to read medicine. Of the teachers, the one who held him was Karl Friedrich Burdach, who came to the Dorpat chair of anatomy, physiology and forensic medicine the year after he matriculated, and who had set himself two research tasks: the brain, and generation. The other two names Baer himself kept were the physicist Georg Friedrich Parrot and the botanist Carl Friedrich von Ledebour. His own herbarium survives at the Estonian University of Life Sciences.

In 1812 Napoleon invaded and the French left flank laid siege to Riga. Typhus broke out in the Russian garrison, and the medical students of Dorpat, Baer among them, went there to help. Through 1812 and 1813 he worked in the great military lazaretto, overwhelmed with patients, short of remedies and shorter still of experienced physicians to direct the work. Like most of the doctors and their assistants he caught typhus himself, and survived it. It was at Riga that he concluded his Dorpat education had not been equal to the job in front of him; on graduating he told his father he would have to go abroad to complete his education, because he did not think it had been completed at home.

The dissertation was defended on 29 August old style or 10 September new in 1814 — the sources give one or the other, and they are almost certainly the same day. The Latin “Dissertatio inauguralis medica, de morbis inter Esthonos endemicis” runs to 88 pages on the endemic diseases of the Estonians, with the professor of pathology and therapy Daniel Georg Balk as its censor. It is not laboratory work but a description of a country: the geography and climate of Estonia, then the customs, dwellings, clothing, food, drink, bodily constitution and character of the rural people, all treated as causes of disease. In its second chapter he states that the Estonians belong to the peoples of Finnic origin. It reached Estonian only in 1976, in Ülo Torpats’s translation: a hundred and sixty-two years.

After the defence he left, in August 1814, by way of Königsberg for Berlin and then Vienna, doing the rounds of the famous professors’ clinics. This was still an attempt to become a better physician, and it did not take. In the autumn of 1815 he reached Würzburg to find that Ignaz Döllinger was giving no course in comparative anatomy that semester, and took it hard. What Döllinger said to him then is told from Baer’s own autobiography in L. Ya. Bliakher’s history of embryology in Russia, here in the words of its English translation of 1982: “Why do you want lectures? Bring some animal and dissect it, and another, and study their structure.” Baer was back the next day with leeches from an apothecary’s, and began on them. From that point he was no longer a physician.

Deutsche Biographie: Baer, Karl Ernst von · K. E. von Baer, De morbis inter Esthonos endemicis (1814), University of Tartu repository · Estonian Wikiquote: Karl Ernst von Baer · L. Ya. Bliakher, ‘History of Embryology in Russia from the Middle of the Eighteenth to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century’ (Moscow 1955; English translation by H. I. Youssef and B. Abdel Malek, Smithsonian Institution 1982), ch. 14 — UNSW Embryology · K. E. von Baer, ‘Nachrichten über Leben und Schriften’ (1864)

The invitation came from his own old Dorpat teacher. On 13 November 1817, three months after Baer arrived, the Royal Anatomical Institute opened and he was its first prosector. Burdach treated him as a colleague rather than an assistant. From his very first winter, 1817–18, Baer lectured on anthropology, and pointedly opened the course to students of every faculty, not only medicine. In 1821 he founded the university’s zoological museum and directed it until he left; at the botanical garden he stood in several times for the official holder of the post. Zoology at Königsberg effectively begins with him.

Which titles he held and when is not agreed between three traditions of reference work. One says: extraordinary professor of anatomy in 1819, ordinary professor of zoology in 1826. Another: professor of anatomy from 1819, ordinary professor of natural history and zoology from 1821 or 1822, with the anatomy chair and institute coming in 1826. A third, following Kholodkovsky: extraordinary in 1819, ordinary professor of zoology and botany in 1822. All three are serious works, and they do not agree.

On 1 January 1820 he married Auguste von Medem, a woman of Königsberg. They had six children — five sons and a daughter: Magnus in 1820, Karl in 1822, August in 1824, Alexander in 1826, Maria in 1828 and Hermann in 1829. The first of them, Magnus, died in 1828 at eight. That is why the departure of 1834 was a genuine uprooting rather than a change of post. In 1825 his father died at Königsberg too.

The St Petersburg Academy elected him a corresponding member in 1826, and in 1828 he refused their invitation to come and work there. In 1829 he accepted, travelled out leaving his family in Königsberg, was made a full academician and director of the zoological museum — and came back in 1830. On 11 April 1834 he was elected an ordinary academician a second time. This time he went. The reason the reference works give is not a scientific one: in 1834 his elder brother Louis, who had been managing the estate at Piibe, died, and Baer wanted to keep Piibe in the family. On 19 October 1834 he left Königsberg with his whole family. (The widespread version that blames the departure on a son’s death does not hold: the son who died of typhus, Karl, died later, at twenty-one, a student at Dorpat.) German biographical writing treats the abandonment of the Königsberg professorship as the single most consequential step of his life.

Jane Oppenheimer, ‘Baer, Karl Ernst von’, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Encyclopedia.com) · Embryo Project Encyclopedia: Karl Ernst von Baer · Wikipedia (in Russian): Бэр, Карл Эрнст фон · Deutsche Biographie: Baer, Karl Ernst von

Before him, the wrong thing was taken for the egg. In 1672 Reinier de Graaf had described and drawn the vesicles in the mammalian ovary and taken them to be the eggs themselves — hence the Graafian follicle, and hence the claim that mammals, like birds, come from eggs. He was describing a real structure and drawing the wrong conclusion from it: the vesicle he saw is about a hundred times too large, a fluid-filled sac with the egg inside it. When Baer published, he did not mock de Graaf: he argued that the misconception arose because de Graaf used the word “ovum” in two senses. The man who overturned the reading of the ovary spent part of his forty pages exonerating the man he had overturned.

The animal was not a laboratory dog. It was the house dog of Karl Friedrich Burdach — his old Dorpat teacher, and the man who had brought him to Königsberg. Baer asked for the bitch, which had come into heat a few days before. Here the sources part: Britannica and several surveys say the dog was pregnant, the Cambridge account says she was in heat. The difference is not small — one places the observation before ovulation and the other after fertilisation. Estonian sources put the find in 1826 and the publication in 1827; English surveys put the sighting in the spring of 1827. One source dates the actual sighting to about 1 May 1827 — which would be the morning after Walpurgis Night.

At first the ovaries showed him nothing but follicles, and he had all but abandoned the search when he saw, without a lens, that some of them held a small yellow spot. He opened one, carried the speck on a knife to a watch glass of water and set it under the microscope: it was what is now called the oocyte. His own sentence about it is the most quoted in the history of embryology. He recoiled “as if struck by lightning”, because — in C. D. O’Malley’s English translation of 1956 — “I clearly saw a minuscule and well developed yellow sphere of yolk”. Most retellings stop there, but it is the second half that makes it a scientist’s sentence rather than a slogan: he was then “afraid I had been deluded by a phantom”.

The announcement was not a paper but a letter. “De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi”, a thin Latin quarto printed at Leipzig in 1827, is formally addressed and given to the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg, which had elected him a corresponding member the year before. Forty pages and one hand-coloured engraved plate. He resolved the terminological mess by keeping both objects: alongside the Graafian vesicle he placed a second, smaller ovum — “an ovum raised to the second power”, which he called the ovulum, the little egg. The same year he gave us the word “spermatozoa”. At first the pamphlet went unnoticed; it took a meeting in Berlin on 23 September 1828, where Anders Retzius asked him to demonstrate the discovery, to put it in front of the public. And he did not know he had found a cell: cell theory did not exist in 1827.

Tatjana Buklijas & Nick Hopwood, ‘Making Visible Embryos: Cells and disciplines’ (University of Cambridge, 2008–2010) · K. E. von Baer, De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi (1827), University of Tartu repository · M. Thiery, ‘Reinier De Graaf (1641–1673) and the Graafian follicle’, Gynecological Surgery 6 (2009) · K. E. von Baer, ‘On the Genesis of the Ovum of Mammals and of Man’, translated by C. D. O’Malley, Isis 47 (1956) 117–153 · Jeremy Norman’s History of Information: ‘Karl Ernst von Baer Discovers the Mammalian Ovum’ (quotes O’Malley’s translation, Isis 47, p. 120)

The work it all started from was not his. Döllinger wanted someone to follow the chick’s development day by day; Baer could not meet the cost of the eggs and of an attendant to watch the incubators. At a gathering of Baltic students in Germany in March 1816 he renewed his acquaintance with Christian Heinrich Pander, whom he had known at Dorpat, and persuaded him to come to Würzburg. Pander, who was richer, took the work on, and in his 1817 dissertation described the first five days of the chick embryo and its germ layers. Baer extended the germ-layer concept from the chick to all vertebrates.

“Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere. Beobachtung und Reflexion” appeared at Königsberg in 1828 (part one) and 1837 (part two). In it he named the chorda dorsalis — the notochord, in German the Rückensaite, the dorsal string — reading it as the axis around which bilateral symmetry is built. And in the Fifth Scholium of part one he set down four laws of development. The more general characters of a large group appear in the embryo earlier than the more special; from the most general form the less general develops, and so on to the most special; the embryo of a given form, instead of passing through other forms, departs from them; and the fourth: the embryo of a higher animal never resembles the adult of a lower animal, but only that animal’s embryo.

The fourth law is the one that does the demolition. His target in 1828 was not Darwin, who did not yet exist, but the parallelism doctrine of Johann Friedrich Meckel and Étienne Serres, which held that the embryo of a higher animal passes in sequence through the adult forms of lower ones. Baer’s answer: a human embryo never passes through a fish; it resembles a fish embryo, because both are embryos. And his most famous sentence is a confession: he had two embryos in spirit in jars whose labels had been lost, and he could not say whether they were lizards, small birds or mammals.

Darwin came to these laws in 1842, through Johannes Peter Müller, and saw at once that they supported descent with modification: if the embryos of related animals resemble one another, the resemblance is inherited. In the Origin of Species (1859) he turns Baer’s observations into an argument for common descent, and writing to Asa Gray in 1860 he says embryology is to him by far the strongest single class of facts in favour of change of forms. Baer himself refused that reading. He did not deny that species change — Darwin’s own historical sketch lists him among the transformists — but he rejected natural selection as a sufficient cause, the derivation of humans from apes, and Haeckel’s phylogenetic trees. His long answer, “Über Darwins Lehre”, appeared in 1876, the year he died.

Wikipedia: Von Baer’s laws (embryology) · Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere I (Königsberg 1828) · Embryo Project: Christian Heinrich Pander · Darwin Correspondence Project: Darwin to Asa Gray, 10 September 1860

Three years after moving to St Petersburg he went north. In 1837 the Academy sent him to Novaya Zemlya at the head of an expedition, and no naturalist had collected there before him; the ship was the schooner Krotov. He did not only collect animals and plants but studied permafrost and periglacial landforms — Erki Tammiksaar has a paper of its own in Polar Record on his contribution to the physical geography of the Arctic in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1840 he went to Lapland, with the young Alexander von Middendorff for company.

The Krotov turned out to be too small to hold the whole party, let alone the live cow Baer meant to bring as a supply of fresh meat: a lodya called Svyatoy Elisey was hired from two Arkhangelsk walrus hunters and the collections were stored in her cabin. So the first scientific expedition to Novaya Zemlya sailed as two vessels, one of them a walrus-hunters’ boat, and the Academy paid 9 385 roubles for the whole of it. The scientific party was the naturalist A. A. Lehmann, the geologist Röder and the preparator Filippov; Röder also drew, and the lithographs in the album “Baer’s Journey to Novaya Zemlya in 1837” are from his sketches. They worked both shores of the Matochkin Shar strait, Serebryanka and Bezymyannaya bays and the country around Kostin Shar, spent about six weeks ashore, and the voyage as a whole lasted four months in extremely unfavourable weather. How much botany came home is disputed: the Russian profile says up to 90 species, the Väike-Maarja Museum says 135 of the 160 species then known there; on invertebrates both say 70. In May 1840 he set north a second time, again for Novaya Zemlya, and the weather turned the vessel back — the work was done on the Murman coast instead, with the young Alexander von Middendorff for company.

In 1845 the Russian Geographical Society was founded at his initiative — with Fyodor Litke and Ferdinand Wrangel, and seventeen charter members. That society became the leader of Russian Arctic exploration, and Baer’s part in it was the restoration of a tradition that had died out by the end of the eighteenth century. He was also the first president of the Russian Entomological Society. The man who had begun thirty years before in Würzburg with leeches from a pharmacy was now organising an empire’s expeditions.

And then came the thing that leads straight into the next chapter. From 1853 to 1857 he headed an investigation into the fisheries of the Caspian Sea and of the Volga and its tributaries, and into the Caucasus. The results appeared in eight parts: “Kaspische Studien” I–VIII, St Petersburg 1855–1859. He brought back a rare collection of Caspian vertebrates and invertebrates; his molluscs are still in the zoological museum of Lviv University, where Clessin and Dybowski described them in 1887–1888. The Siberian sturgeon, Acipenser baerii, carries his name from those waters.

He was called to the fisheries because by 1853 catches in the Caspian basin were visibly falling: Count Kiselyov’s Ministry of State Domains asked Baer, then sixty-one, to head a survey of the important fishing grounds along the whole Caspian coast, above all around Astrakhan and the mouth of the Kura. Four journeys between 1853 and 1857 together form one expedition; in the summer of 1853 the party went down the Volga from Nizhny Novgorod, stopping at the salt lakes of Elton and Baskunchak on the way. Nikolai Danilevsky was seconded as his chief assistant and took charge of the ichthyology. Baer’s finding was that nature was not running out: he blamed the acquisitive self-interest of the private fishing contractors, their predatory methods and their primitive handling of the catch. What he pressed for was therefore regulation of gear and practice and better treatment of the fish, not simply fishing less; with Danilevsky, beside the “Kaspische Studien”, came nine volumes of “Studies on the State of Fisheries in Russia” (1860–1875). Which law came of it is disputed: the Estonian Institute of Zoology and Botany biography credits Baer’s fisheries work with Russia’s first fish protection law, of 1859; Russian fisheries histories name instead the Charter of Caspian Fish and Seal Fisheries of 27 May 1865.

The landscape itself carries his name there too. Between the mouths of the Kuma and the Emba, on the Caspian lowland, are hundreds of long undulating ridges called in Russian “беровские бугры” — Baer hillocks. He described them in 1856 by most accounts — the Russian Wikipedia article says 1866. The fisheries reports were what he had been hired for; but a man who spent four years going up and down the Volga began to look at the banks as well. The observations the law rests on were made in 1855; the explanation appeared in the Astrakhan provincial gazette in 1856, in Morskoy Sbornik in 1857, or in the eighth part of the Kaspische Studien in 1860, depending on which tradition you read.

Jane Oppenheimer, ‘Baer, Karl Ernst von’, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Encyclopedia.com) · Erki Tammiksaar, ‘The contributions of Karl Ernst von Baer to the investigation of the physical geography of the Arctic in the 1830s–40s’, Polar Record 38 (2002) · E. Tammiksaar (comp.), ‘A short biography of Karl Ernst von Baer’, zbi.ee · V. V. Anistratenko, O. Yu. Anistratenko & I. Shydlovskyy, ‘Karl E. von Baer’s collection of Caspian Sea molluscs stored in the Zoological Museum of Lviv University, Ukraine. Part 1. Catalogue and general description’, Archiv für Molluskenkunde 147 (2018) · Бэровские бугры (Russian Wikipedia) · Russian Geographical Society: «От Новой Земли до Каспийского моря: открытия Карла Бэра» (From Novaya Zemlya to the Caspian Sea: the discoveries of Karl Baer; in Russian) · GoArctic, «Герои Арктики»: Карл Бэр (Heroes of the Arctic: Karl Baer; in Russian) · Baeri maja, Eesti Maaülikooli teadusloo keskus (archived copy)

Anthropology was not a sideline. He lectured it in his first Königsberg winter, 1817–18, and pointedly opened the course to students of every faculty. In 1824 the first part of “Vorlesungen über Anthropologie” appeared — the only book-length statement from that period; a second volume was promised and never came. At St Petersburg he built up the Academy’s craniological collection and in 1858 published a study of its history and its collectors. How those skulls were got is in his own sentence: “I was stealing some skulls from the bone chamber when a bigamist cleric stopped me.” Two other routes into that collection are on record. In 1859 he noted with enthusiasm in a Russian magazine that the Academy had just been enriched by “83 skulls of different peoples”, bequeathed by Georg Joseph Peitsch, a German military doctor in Dutch service at Batavia. And seven Tlingit skeletons, taken after killings near Sitka in March 1852, were bought from a San Francisco dealer and presented to St Petersburg in 1857. Where the material came from is not a side issue; it is part of what the measurements were.

In 1859 the Academy’s Mémoires carried “Crania selecta ex thesauris anthropologicis Academiae Imperialis Petropolitanae” — a catalogue of selected skulls and a system for measuring them. German biographical sources say that when he began working through the Academy’s holdings systematically in 1858 the collection stood at 350 skulls, 69 of them from prehistoric graves — that is the base the book was drawn from, and it shows how thin the evidential ground of early craniometry was. It ran to twenty-six pages and sixteen plates, and its atlas printed skull profiles superimposed on one another, so that two “types” could be compared at a glance; that superimposition is one of the ways craniometry made racial difference look measurable. The same year brought the commentary “Über Papuas und Alfuren”, in which he sorted New Guinea into two anthropological types from skulls and proposed that the Alfuros were an admixture of Australian and Papuan stock. In September 1861 he and Rudolf Wagner convened anatomists, physiologists and zoologists at Göttingen to agree on methods of measurement. With Anders Retzius he made physical anthropology, through the cranial index of the 1850s, into a measuring science.

What, then, did he argue. Two things are true of him and they pull in opposite directions. Jane Oppenheimer’s article in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography is blunt: “Baer classified man into six categories ranked according to the degree of primitiveness”, and on some peoples, it adds, he thought much as his contemporaries did. At the same time he was a monogenist: in 1859 he argued that stocks now distinct might have originated from a single form. Benoit Massin’s study of German physical anthropology describes the two organisers of the 1861 meeting as devout Christians, to whom polygenism — which denied Europeans and non-Europeans a common origin — and the materialism of the early Darwinians were threats to a humanity they held to be one. The alliance with Wagner rested, then, on belief as well as on anatomy. One act of that alliance is worth recording: Baer and Wagner deliberately kept Carl Gustav Carus out of the Göttingen gathering. Carus was a well-known naturalist who had worked on skulls and race for more than two decades, and who used his data for a polygenist theory of white supremacy. It would be tidy to count the exclusion in Baer’s favour. Stephan Strunz, who has read the correspondence, does not: by his account the quarrel was less with Carus’s politics than with his method, a Romantic physiognomy the measurers had come to think out of date.

And the position shifted. Nathaniel Knight, whose essay on this appeared in Estonian translation (Vikerkaar 9/2020, translated from his English manuscript by M. V.; the phrases quoted here are this page’s translation from that Estonian), argues that Baer’s views changed after he moved to the Russian Empire: in 1846 he was arguing that inherited racial traits, skull structure above all, were decisive for mental capacity — that only “Caucasian or Indo-European” peoples had reached the most advanced religious, political and social development, while peoples of “black, red or olive-coloured skin” could neither spread their beliefs nor arrive at forms of government with limits on power. Thirteen years later he was telling the Academy the opposite: from the collection itself he concluded that skull form cannot identify a language group or settle a question of historical origin, pointing to the dramatic differences in skull shape among peoples whose languages are related as evidence that environment can alter the human organism in a relatively short time. That is a genuine negative result, produced by the measuring programme he had built, against the thing it had been built to show. His distinctive contribution was environmentalist — the malleability of man, geography over heredity — and it became a lasting strain in the Russian human sciences. But what does not follow is what a StudyGuides.com overview makes of it: that his monogenism “supported the notion of equality among races, aligning with anti-racist ideologies”. Six categories ranked by primitiveness and equality among races do not mean the same thing, and this page does not say they do.

Erki Tammiksaar & Ken Kalling, “I was stealing some skulls from the bone chamber when a bigamist cleric stopped me.” Karl Ernst von Baer and the development of physical anthropology in Europe, Centaurus 60 (2018) · Nathaniel Knight, ‘Karl Ernst von Baer ja rassiküsimus’, Vikerkaar 9/2020 (Estonian translation by M. V.; ERR reprint) · Jane Oppenheimer, ‘Baer, Karl Ernst von’, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Encyclopedia.com) · Stephan Strunz, ‘Anthropology from the Margins: The Craniological Network of Carl Gustav Carus’, NTM 33 (2025), CC BY 4.0 · B. Ottow, ‘K. E. von Baer als Kraniologe und die Anthropologen-Versammlung 1861 in Göttingen’, Sudhoffs Archiv 50 (1966) 43–68 · Elena Govor & Hilary Howes, «Как останки тихоокеанских народов попали в российские коллекции» (How Human Remains from Pacific Peoples Entered Russian Collections; in Russian), Антропологии / Anthropologies (2022) · Kulturstiftung: Baer, Karl Ernst von · Benoit Massin, ‘From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and “Modern Race Theories” in Wilhelmine Germany’, in G. W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 87 · StudyGuides.com: ‘Baer, Karl Ernst Von (German Scientist) – Overview’ (quoted in order to disagree with it)

Fifty-three years after he left it as a doctor of medicine, he came back. The last nine years, 1867 to 1876, he lived in Tartu; from 1869 he was president of the Estonian Naturalists’ Society. In those years he brought out a three-volume collection of articles and speeches, and into it went his long answer to Darwin, “Über Darwins Lehre”, published in 1876 — the year he died.

He died on 28 November 1876 — 16 November by the old calendar — at eighty-four years and nine months. No source found writes that number out; it is a subtraction between two dates the sources do give. He lies in Raadi cemetery, in its Old St John’s section.

The monument on Toomemägi is the work of Aleksandr Opekushin and was unveiled in 1886, ten years after his death. Since 1988 the student corporations climb up on the evening of 30 April and wash his head with sparkling wine — several bottles, by report, to get the shine right — and tie a black-and-white ribbon round his neck afterwards. If one dating holds, which puts the sighting of the ovum at about 1 May 1827, then Tartu has been scrubbing his head, by accident, on the eve of that discovery.

Two memorial stones stand at both places of his childhood. In the park at Piibe a boulder was unveiled on 25 September 1960, its Estonian and Russian inscription calling him “the Russian academician and biologist” — a Soviet-era wording in its own right. A new plaque was fixed to it on 24 August 2002. At Lasila, beside the school, a stone was unveiled on 2 October 1976, the centenary of his death. And in 1992, when Estonia got its own money back, his face was on the face of the two-kroon note.

Kultuurimälestiste register: Baeri mälestussammas · Tartu Postimees: Baeri pea sai taas šampusevahuga puhtaks · monument.ee: Piibe mälestuskivi · monument.ee: Lasila mälestuskivi