He made extensive studies of the flora and fauna of the Przemyśl area and contributed especially to knowledge of the plant and mollusc distributions in the Carpathians.
[1] After graduating from secondary school in Cieszyn in 1868 he went to the University of Vienna and studied medicine before transferring to physics.
He moved to Przemyśl in 1875 as a teacher of mathematics and natural history at the junior high school.
Unable to afford a guide they travelled carelessly and he slipped through thin ice and fell into a crevasse in the Ebenferner glacier.
A species of snail is named after him as Hessemilimax kotulae (Westerlund, 1883) which was originally described with the wrong Latin gender ending as Semilimax kotulai.