 He studied geology at the Universities of Würzburg and Munich, obtaining his doctorate in 1878 with a thesis on Jurassic fossils from the Argentine Cordillera.In 1880 he became an assistant at the mineralogical institute in Kiel, receiving his habilitation the same year with a dissertation on sedimentary-drift in the Province of Schleswig-Holstein.In 1881 he relocated to Japan, where he was tasked with completing the establishment of a mineralogical-geological institute at the University of Tokyo.