Ethelbert Blatter

The young Blatter lived in his uncle's home, a castle overlooking Rebstein and located in the Rhine valley just before the river's union with Lake Constance (Bodensee).

In October 1896, after finishing high school, Blatter moved to the border town of Feldkirch, Austria to join the Noviciate of the German Province of the Society of Jesus.

His most important contributions from this time were a series of articles written between 1904 and 1909 (although published later) and titled, The Palms of British India and Ceylon, Indigenous and Introduced.

Ordained as a priest on 25 August 1912, Blatter spent another year in the Netherlands, before returning to London to compile data for his next effort, Flora Arabica.

[1] Returning to his position as professor of botany at St Xavier's, Blatter expended great energy during the next few years both traveling and building an extensive botanical collection.

[6] Other books pertaining to India from this time were the two-volume Beautiful Flowers of Kashmir (1927, 1928);[7] The Flora of the Indus Delta (with Charles McCann and T. S. Sabnis, 1929);[8] and The Ferns of Bombay (with J. F. D'Almeida, 1932).

In 1930, during an expedition to Waziristan, a political agency in the North-West Frontier Province of British India,[10] Blatter had a bad fall from a horse, and the resulting injuries brought on a partial paralysis.