Hermann Hellriegel

Hermann Hellriegel (1831 to 1895) was a German agricultural chemist, born at Mausitz in the Kingdom of Saxony. He directed the agricultural experiment station of Brandenburg and Niederlausitz at Dahme from 1857 to 1873, worked as a travelling teacher at Bernburg until 1882, and then took a similar station post at Bernburg, where he died. His most important result was the demonstration that leguminous plants can assimilate free nitrogen from the air, and that the tubercles on their roots are the means by which this happens. With Hermann Wilfarth he showed in 1887 that peas grown in soil inoculated with leachings from a fertile soil formed root nodules and thrived, while peas without the inoculum failed. He published the work in Untersuchungen über die Stickstoffnahrung der Gramineen und Leguminosen in 1888.