Born in
Stralsund, he followed the example of
Alexander von Humboldt and traveled 1844-56 the northern part of
South America (
Venezuela,
Ecuador and
Colombia). From 1856 to 1868, he was a professor at the agricultural college in
Berlin, afterwards serving as a professor of
plant physiology at the
University of Vienna (1868–72). In 1881, at the suggestion of
David Friedrich Weinland, Karsten became convinced of the correctness of
Otto Hahn's organic theory of the
chondrites and, as a result, wrote an essay entitled "Die Meteorite und ihre Organismen" in which he declared his support for Hahn's theory. He died 1908 in
Berlin-
Grunewald. As a
taxonomist, he was the
binomial author of many botanical species. == Selected bibliography ==