Enrico Dalgas

Enrico Mylius Dalgas (1828 to 1894) was a Danish engineer who pioneered the soil melioration of Jutland. Born in Naples, where his father was the Danish consul, he was brought back to Denmark at the age of seven after his father died. He served as an officer of the Engineer Corps and mostly as a highway engineer, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and applied his engineering and organisational skills to the reclamation and afforestation of western Jutland after the Schleswig wars. In 1867 he founded the Danish Heath Society, Hedeselskabet, with the jurist Georg Morville and the landowner Ferdinand Mourier-Petersen. He wrote books on land improvement, forestry and the natural history of forests and heaths, and his work was later used by Carl Emeis as the basis for a theory on hardpan and heaths.