Neumayer was born on 11 November 1791 in Peggau, in the Austrian province of Styria, the son of Joseph Neumayer and Eva Mayer. He studied medicine in Vienna without completing his degree, an incomplete education that was nonetheless typical of an era when botanical training was acquired largely through medical study. Broadly curious, he pursued zoology, entomology, ornithology and malacology alongside botany, and drew on the collections and literature of the Imperial Museum in Vienna, where he also worked for a time. In 1825 he arrived in Dubrovnik, then known as Ragusa, as a member of an expedition led by the German entomologist Heinrich Kratter, and the region would hold him for the rest of his life.

Historical accounts of Neumayer have long been unreliable. Earlier writers recorded his given name variously as Franz or Giuseppe, and some placed his death in 1842 rather than 1840. The new research resolved these discrepancies using primary sources: the baptismal register of his home parish in Deutschfeistritz, the death register of the Dubrovnik Diocese, and probate documents from the Dubrovnik State Archive. These confirm that he died on 18 September 1840 in the village of Kuna on the Pelješac peninsula, in the house of a local man named Gašpar Ostoja, from what his death record called febbre putrida, the malarial fever he had contracted while surveying the Neretva delta’s wetlands. He was buried in the parish cemetery at Kuna.

Neumayer’s professional life was precarious. His official employment as a cadastral field surveyor for real-estate tax assessment could not support his family, so he also taught Latin and German at the Dubrovnik Gymnasium. In 1835 he married Ana Matičević from the nearby village of Čibača, and by his death the couple had six children, all still minors. The probate records show the family was left with debts of 318 florins, mostly for rent, food and clothing repairs. Neumayer’s prized natural history collection was appraised at only 95 florins, far too little to cover the outstanding sums. Dubrovnik newspapers reported that the family was left with nothing but his collection of plants, reptiles and molluscs.

Yet it was precisely this material that made Neumayer valuable to professional science. The study of one botanist collecting on behalf of another was already established in Dalmatia by the 16th century, practiced by figures such as Luigi Anguillara, first prefect of the Padua Botanical Garden, and the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin, whose Eastern Mediterranean expeditions helped pin down the identities of plants described by the ancient author Dioscorides. By the first half of the 19th century, the period has been called the Period of Collectors in present-day Croatia. After the Napoleonic Wars redrew the continent’s borders, the Kingdoms of Croatia and Dalmatia were unified within the Austrian Empire, whose botanical circles actively encouraged natural history research even as the region remained floristically almost unknown.

The linchpin of Neumayer’s scientific life was Roberto Visiani, a Croatian botanist of Italian descent born in Šibenik, widely regarded as the foremost specialist in Mediterranean flora of his generation. Their collaboration began in 1826, while Visiani served as a physician in Dalmatian towns including Kotor, Drniš and Budva. Neumayer became one of 23 collectors who supplied plants for Visiani’s monumental Flora Dalmatica. Visiani praised him as excellent in his work, tireless in collecting, and very knowledgeable about the flora around Dubrovnik, and annotated the folder holding Neumayer’s letters with the description: an industrious and intelligent collector of plants, shells and reptiles. Twenty letters and four appended lists survive in the archives of the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, where the specimens Neumayer shipped over fourteen years of collaboration are preserved.

The correspondence documents a man of unusual breadth and scrupulousness. Neumayer sent numbered specimens from his own herbarium for identification because he lacked the reference literature to determine them himself, and he requested specific contemporary works by Sprengel, Persoon and Reichenbach. A contemporary noted that, despite owning only a few specialized books, he was himself a living encyclopedia, and he read in every European language except Polish and Russian. He focused primarily on phanerogams, especially the grasses (Poaceae), legumes (Fabaceae) and spurges (Euphorbiaceae), but also collected cryptogams. His collecting range was remarkable, stretching from sea-level coastal rocks to the summits of Mount Biokovo at 1,762 meters, and from Split in the northwest to Budva in the southeast, taking in the islands of Lastovo and Korčula, the Bay of Kotor, Mount Orjen and the Ottoman borderlands of Montenegro.

Fieldwork of this kind was dangerous, costly and logistically fraught. Neumayer needed permission from the governor Franz Ludwig von Welden to work in the malarial Neretva marshes, then effectively a border zone with the Ottoman Empire. He depended on local guides, lost material to careless assistants, negotiated shipments through physicians and students traveling to Padua, and watched a cholera epidemic approach the Neretva Valley during his 1836 campaign. His expenses included herbarium paper, maps, boxes, tools, guns, ammunition and clothing. When Tommasini withdrew funding after five years of support, Neumayer turned to Visiani for the twelve florins that financed his 1832 Neretva expedition. He typically refused payment for specimens, writing to Visiani that it would be selfish to accept money for his small contribution to botany, asking instead for duplicates from Visiani’s Dalmatian herbarium.

The scientific payoff was substantial. From Neumayer’s collections from Mount Orjen and elsewhere, Visiani described seven taxa new to science, including Amphoricarpos neumayeri and Avena neumayeriana, and honored his correspondent by naming four further taxa after him. Across Flora Dalmatica, Neumayer is credited as collector or sender of specimens twenty, eighteen and forty-seven times respectively in the first three volumes, and his material underpinned the description of seventeen taxa new to science in total. In total, forty-six of his specimens survive in the herbarium of Domenico Pappafava in Zadar, some still never identified to species level. His fame extended beyond botany: the Western Rock Nuthatch, Sitta neumayer, was named for him after he supplied specimens of the bird to the German zoologist Karl Wilhelm Michahelles, and a contemporary historian credited his tireless research with making almost all Dalmatian bird species known.

The study also reads Neumayer’s specimens through a modern conservation lens, and the results are sobering. Some species he collected, such as Sporobolus aculeatus and Ephedra distachya, remain rare in the Croatian flora today. Prangos ferulacea, collected in the mountains around Dubrovnik, has not been recorded in the country since his time, even though its rocky habitats have changed little. The Neretva delta, which he loved and where he eventually died, has fared worst: roughly eighty percent of its wetland habitats were lost to land reclamation by the mid-20th century, and the sundew Drosera longifolia he gathered in its marshes is now regionally extinct in Croatia. A few of his labels record apparent misidentifications that later taxonomic work has corrected. Neumayer’s story is a reminder that the foundations of modern biodiversity science rest not only on celebrated professors but on poorly paid, often forgotten local collectors whose specimens, and whose deaths in the field, made the grand floras possible.

Subject of Research: The role of amateur botanical collectors in advancing 19th-century Mediterranean floristics, focused on Joseph Martin Neumayer in Dalmatia

Article Title: The contribution of amateur botanists to the advancement of botanical science in the first half of the 19th century: The case of Joseph Martin Neumayer (1791–1840)

Article References: Marić, M., Jasprica, N., & Maslek, J. (2026). The contribution of amateur botanists to the advancement of botanical science in the first half of the 19th century: The case of Joseph Martin Neumayer (1791–1840). Italian Botanist, 21, 109-138. https://doi.org/10.3897/italianbotanist.21.183349

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/italianbotanist.21.183349

Keywords: Joseph Martin Neumayer, Roberto Visiani, Flora Dalmatica, Dalmatia, herbarium collections, botanical history, amateur naturalists, Neretva delta, malaria, plant taxonomy, Mediterranean flora, Croatian botany