George Simonds Boulger

“ He illustrated the fulness of his scientific knowledge in his catalogue of the osteological specimens in the College of Surgeons Museum (1891) , and in the address on the classification of birds at the second International Ornithological Congress at Buda-Pest (1891) , when the Emperor of Austria conferred upon him the gold medal for art and science. Sharpe was long a popvilar lecturer on ornithological topics, showing some exquisite lantern-slides. He issued the substance of some of his lectures as 'Wonders of the Bird World ' in 1898. ”

“ Hooker's descriptions are singularly accurate, and he always completed the works that he planned. In addition to his own work, he liberally assisted younger botanists, and did much to advance the science by persuading the treasury, the admiralty, and the Indian and colonial governments to produce local floras. Of these the flora of British North America was by himself, and those of New Zealand, Australia, the British West Indies, the Cape colonies, and tropical Africa were inaugurated by him, and for the most part elaborated in his herbarium and library. ”

“ On the death of Lindley, its founder, in November 1865, Masters, whose elder brother William was associated with the 'Gardeners' chronicle' at its establishment in 1841, was appointed principal editor of that journal, and henceforth the horticultural side of botany was his dominant interest for life. ”

“ On the death of Charles Babington, professor of botany at Cambridge, in 1895, Ward succeeded him, becoming at the same time professorial fellow of Sidney Sussex College. At Cambridge Ward worked with great vigour, infusing his own energy into university syndicates, colleagues, and students. Mainly through his effort the new botany schools were opened in 1904. They proved the best equipped laboratories in the kingdom. ”

“ The last collection, with that of Professor Balfour, amounting to fifty thousand species, represented by about ten times as many specimens, formed the nucleus of the Edinburgh university herbarium. An outdoor naturalist, fond in his younger days of his rod and his gun, he was a man of many-sided culture, agreeable in society, musical, with an artist's eye, and considerable literary taste. ”

“ In 1868 he was president of section D of the British Association, and between 1871 and 1875 he acted as one of the revisers of Griffith and Henfrey's 'Micrographic Dictionary.' Berkeley was also for many years an examiner at the university of London, but deafness and advancing years caused him to retire from scientific work in 1879, when he presented his herbarium of fungi——comprising more than ten thousand species——and his books on the subject, to the Royal Gardens at Kew. ”

“ Mary the Less, Cambridge. On the death in 1827 of Thomas Martyn, in whose hands the professorship of botany had for thirty years been a sinecure, Henslow was appointed to the chair. He shortly afterwards resigned the professorship of mineralogy, and held the botanical chair for the remainder of his life. His enthusiasm rendered botany a popular subject in the university, and his excursions and soirées were attended by men of various tastes, Darwin, Berkeley, and Babington being among his pupils. Darwin, his favourite pupil, always expressed the highest regard for him. ”

“ Sir Joseph Hooker in describing the Scitamineous 'Burbidgea nitida ' (Botanical Magazine 1879 t. 6403) names it 'in recognition of Burbidge's eminent services to horticulture, whether as a collector in Borneo, or as author of "Cultivated Plants, their Propagation and Improvement," a work which should be in every gardener's library.' In 1880 Burbidge was appointed curator of the botanical gardens of Trinity College, Dublin, at Glasnevin. There he did much to encourage gardening in Ireland (Gardeners' Chronicle, 1901, ii. 460) . ”

“ In the interim, in 1837 and 1838, he visited the Channel Islands, and in 1839 published his account of their flora as ‘Primitiæ Floræ Sarnicæ.’ In 1836 he was one of the founders of the Ray Club, of which he acted as secretary for fifty-five years, and he was on the council of the Ray Society, to which the club to some extent gave rise in 1844. The influence of the successive editions of the ‘Manual’ upon field botany can hardly be over-estimated. ”

“ Bewly, being well read in natural philosophy, gained Gough's attention. He made good progress in Latin, but preferred books dealing with natural history. At the age of eight he began studying plants by touch. When thirteen he had recourse to the ‘Synopsis of British Plants,’ by John Wilson of Kendal, and afterwards to the works of Gerard, Parkinson, Hudson, Withering, and Smith, which he had read to him until he knew them by heart. ”

“ A lover of nature rather than a student of natural science, he interested himself in the folklore of plants and sketched with skill plants and flowers. He was a voluminous writer on various themes, and his chief works were illustrated by coloured plates from his own drawings. ”

“ Although it is commonly attributed, on the ground of a modest remark of Grew's, to Sir Thomas Millington, it is probable that to Grew himself belongs the credit of first observing the true existence of sex in plants. Grew has suffered somewhat from an over-conciseness of style, and has been unfortunate in his translators. `The Anatomy begun' was translated into French by Le Vasseur in 1675, and the first three books of the 'Anatomy of Plants' were badly rendered into Latin in Germany. ”

“ In 1892 Sharpe founded the British Ornithologists' Club, which organised research, especially with regard to migration; and in 1905 he presided over the International Ornithological Congress in London, giving a presidential address on the history of the British Museum collection. ”

“ Lindley was frequently consulted by government. Thus, in 1838, he reported on the condition of Kew Gardens, recommending that they should be made over to the nation, and should ultimately become the headquarters of botanical science for the empire. During the potato famine he was sent by Peel to Ireland, and he also advised as to the planting of the island of Ascension. He acted as juror in the exhibition of 1851 for food-products, and although he suffered then from the overwork entailed, he was persuaded in 1862 to take charge of the entire colonial department of the exhibition of that year. ”

“ HANCOCK, ALBANY (1806–1873) , zoologist, was second son and third child of John Hancock, a saddler and ironmonger of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a man of exceptional cultivation, possessing a microscope and a small library containing works of Pliny, Linnæus, Lister, Donovan, and Bewick, and the 'Philosophical Transactions.' John Hancock had also made collections of plants, insects, and especially of shells, and though he died when Albany was six years old, so thoroughly did his widow carry on his teaching that, of their six children, four devoted themselves to the study of natural history. ”

“ Settling down to voluntary botanical work for Sir Joseph Hooker's ‘Flora of British India,’ he was placed on special duty at Kew on the expiration of his leave in 1879, and described, between 1879 and 1883, more than fifty natural orders for the second, third, and fourth volumes of Hooker's work. Returning to India in 1883, Clarke was temporarily appointed director of public instruction in Bengal in 1884, and went in 1885 as inspector to Shillong in Assam, when he studied the flora of the Khasia, Naga, and Manipur hills. ”

“ GRAY, SAMUEL FREDERICK (fl. 1780–1836) , naturalist and pharmacologist, was the posthumous son of Samuel Frederick Gray, the anonymous translator of Linnæus's ‘Philosophia Botanica’ for James Lee's ‘Introduction to Botany.’ Born after his patrimony had been distributed, he was entirely dependent on his own industry, and from 1800 to his death suffered from disease of the lungs. He became a pharmaceutical chemist at Walsall in Staffordshire, where his second son, John Edward Gray [q. v.] , was born; but soon after this removed to London, his son George Robert Gray [q. v.] ”

“ The fines were spent on the school library, on fives-courts, and other improvements, and on a dole of bread to the poor. He encouraged a love of gardening and habits of business among his pupils, and ‘thought it of much more use to’ them ‘to study their own language with accuracy than a dead one.’ Among his pupils, who averaged eighty in number, were Addington (Lord Sidmouth) , the first Lord Redesdale, and his brother, Colonel William Mitford, the historian. During his long summer vacations Gilpin undertook those sketching tours by the publication of which he afterwards became so well known. ”

“ He received a good village education, and was brought up to his father's trade, but removed to Yarmouth before he was twenty, where until 1801 he kept a small school in Fighting-cock Row. He acquired some knowledge of Latin, Greek, and French, was a skilled arithmetician, and wrote a beautifully neat ‘copperplate’ hand; while his love of botany and skill as a collector procured him the acquaintance of Dr. John Aikin, Thomas Jenkinson Woodward, Sir James Edward Smith, and Dawson Turner. He was chiefly devoted to the study of algæ, in which he seems to have initiated Dawson Turner. ”

“ LOUDON, JOHN CLAUDIUS (1783–1843) , landscape-gardener and horticultural writer, son of a farmer, was born at Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, 8 April 1783. As a child he evinced fondness for gardening, and was sent to live with an uncle in Edinburgh in order to obtain a good education. He made rapid progress in drawing and arithmetic, overcame an initial dislike to Latin, and took copious notes on botany and chemistry, illustrated with clever pen-and-ink sketches. ”

“ In 1809 he took up for a time the study of the violin, to which he returned forty years later; and in 1810, having been ill, his attention was first directed to the influence of air upon health, upon which subject he wrote in the ‘Philosophical Magazine.’ The great comet of 1811 directed his attention to astronomy; and in 1812, having been, from his study of Pythagorean and Hindu philosophy and an inherited dislike of cruelty to animals, for some years a vegetarian, he published ‘Reflections on Spirituous Liquors,’ denying man to be by birth a carnivor. ”

“ His herbarium, bequeathed to the Apothecaries' Company, is now in the British Museum, and the neat and elaborate tickets to the plants, many of which he obtained from the Chelsea garden, and numerous correspondents, show him to have been a botanist of no mean calibre. ”

“ Between 1823 and 1828 twenty-five papers by Haworth appeared in the ‘Philosophical Magazine,’ and he also contributed to the ‘Transactions’ of the Linnean and Horticultural societies. Between 1812 and 1819 Haworth wrote a poem in twenty-four cantos, entitled ‘Cottingham,’ part only of which was published in a local newspaper, and that part not evincing much poetic power. Though he never travelled beyond his own country, Haworth was a sound naturalist on all subjects, and his contributions to science are of lasting value. ”

“ Cornus suecica, discovered by Penny in the Cheviots, and other rare plants from both the north and the south of England, credited to him in L'Obel's ‘Adversaria’ (1570–1) and in Gerard's ‘Herball,’ show him to have been a diligent botanist. Gerard styles him ‘a second Dioscorides,’ and his friend Clusius, besides other plants, named the plant now known as Hypericum balearicum, Myrtocistus Pennæi in honour of its discoverer. ”