Batalin, Aleksandr

Born Aug. 1 (13), 1847, in St. Petersburg; died there on Oct. 1 (13), 1896. Russian botanist. Professor at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg (1884–93).

In 1870, Batalin began to work at the St. Petersburg Botanical Garden (becoming its director in 1892), where he founded the first station in Russia for seed experimentation and study (1877). His chief works are on the experimental morphology, physiology, and ecology of plants, including The Mechanics of Movement of Insectivorous Plants (1876). Some of Batalin’s observations on the movement of plants and the biology of flowering were communicated to C. Darwin, who used them in his works. Batalin studied the diversity of strains of many kinds of cultivated plants and thereby contributed to the development of applied botany in Russia.