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Cp. vol. ii. p. 441. [Back to chapter]
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795-1876), Professor of Medicine at Berlin, was the founder and chief representative of the study of microscopic organisms. He was one of Humboldt’s companions on his journey to the Ural and Altai mountains. [Back to chapter]
Francis Bauer (1758-1840), the superb botanical draughtsman employed by Banks, who left him a pension that he might continue his work at Kew. His name appears as illustrator on the title-page of Sir W. Hooker’s Genera Filicum (1838-410); but more than half the plates were drawn by the new draughtsman, Walter Fitch, who was to serve Kew and the Hookers for half a century. [Back to chapter]
See Chapter 4 footnote XXX. [Back to chapter]
J. E. Davis was second master of the Terror. [Back to chapter]
Joseph Dayman was mate on the Erebus, and afterwards lieutenant on the Rattlesnake, in which Huxley was naturalist. In 1840–1, while Ross made his first cruise to the South, Dayman was one of the three officers who remained in charge of the magnetic observatory in Tasmania. [Back to chapter]
Walter Fitch (1817-92) was originally a pattern-drawer in a calico printing factory. He entered Sir W. Hooker’s service in 1834, and for half a century continued as the official draughtsman for the Kew botanical publications. [Back to chapter]
Hugh Cuming (1791-1865), conchologist and botanist, who was long settled at Valparaiso. He spent 1835-9 in exploring the Philippines. It was on his way back to England via the Cape that he visited St. Helena. [Back to chapter]
Archibald Menzies (1754-1842) began his botanical career as a gardener in the Edinburgh Botanic Garden; was encouraged by Hope, the Professor, to qualify as a surgeon, and completed his reputation as naturalist and surgeon on Vancouver’s voyage in the Discovery, 1790-5. He was elected to the Linnean Society in 1790. [Back to chapter]
George Vancouver (1758-98) sailed as a seaman in Cook’s second voyage, and rose to be a captain in the navy. After the Nootka Sound dispute with Spain, he was sent to take over the district again and explore the coast from lat. 30° northwards. On the way out (1791-5) he explored much of Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, returning by Cape Horn. [Back to chapter]
William Wright (1735-1819), a naval surgeon who, being unemployed, took up private practice in Jamaica (1764-77), finally becoming honorary surgeon-general of the island. He corresponded with Banks and others, discovering especially a native species of cinchona in Jamaica. After botanical study in England and military adventures abroad, he finally settled in Edinburgh in 1798. Among his friends was Sir W. Hooker, to whom he presented a collection made in Iceland to replace Sir William’s that had been burned. [Back to chapter]
Thus J. E. Davis, second master of the Terror, later thanking Hooker for the ‘young library’ sent to him, writes: ‘I like Darwin’s Journal much he has accomplished what Old Johnson said of Goldsmith when he heard he was going to write a Natural History: “he will make it as interesting as a Persian tale.”’ (See also the letter to Lady Hooker, Chapter 6: XXX.) [Back to chapter]
i.e. Sir John Richardson of Haslar. [Back to chapter]
Writing to his father on May 3, 1842, from the Falklands, he gives an explanation with which some observant naval officers supplied him: ‘The officers of the Arrow are very nice fellows. One of them told me that as the Macrocystis grows large, it finally weighs up the stone, which was its moorings, and then the whole plant goes off to sea, which fully explains the reason for our finding so much of it alive, at sea.’ [Back to chapter]
William Anderson, at first surgeon’s mate, afterwards naturalist, on the Resolution under Captain Cook. In the account of Cook’s voyages, he is referred to as ‘the ingenious Mr. Anderson.’ He wrote a full account of the Kerguelen Cabbage aforesaid (Pringlea antiscorbutica). [Back to chapter]
Dicotyledons to Monocotyledons as 1: 2; grasses as 1: 2·6 of the whole. [Back to chapter]
‘If I could get a piece,’ responds Sir William enthusiastically, ‘I would have it framed and glazed.’ [Back to chapter]
David Lyall (1817-95) was assistant-surgeon on the Terror and a useful botanist. [Back to chapter]
After his return, however, he had to confess to Ross (Sept. 14, 1845) that the seed he himself brought back to Kew ‘never vegetated, though we sowed all and in all manner of situations.’ He wished to name the plant Rossia kerguelensis, but ‘our friend Brown had already applied the MS. name, given both because of the anti-scorbutic nature of the plant and because Pringle wrote upon scurvy, which has not much to do with the matter, it must be confessed.’ (To Ross, September 1, 1845.) [Back to chapter]
John Lindley (1799-1865). Like Brown and Bentham, Lindley, a hard worker and man of versatile powers, took a conspicuous part in building up the natural system of classification set forth by Jussieu as against the artificial system of Linnaeus; the convenience of which was merely for identifying plants. Through the friendship of Sir W. J. Hooker (for he was an East Anglian) he became assistant librarian to Sir Joseph Banks: then Assistant Secretary and Secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society, 1822-60; Professor of Botany at University College, London, from 1828; editor of the Gardener’s Chronicle, 1841, till his death. He was mainly responsible for Kew Gardens being preserved and made over to the nation as the headquarters of botanical science, though knowing full well that his opposition to officialdom would exclude him from receiving any appointment. His chief works were The Theory and Practice of Horticulture, 1840; The Vegetable Kingdom, 1846; the editing of Botanical Register, 1829-47, and various works on the Orchids. In his views of species he has been described as an evolutionist without knowing it. [Back to chapter]
Pleurocarpi and Acrocarpi are two divisions of the Mosses. [Back to chapter]
Francis Boott, M.D. (1792-1863). Born in Boston of British parents and maintaining friendships in both countries, he took up the study of medicine in 1820 (M.D. Edin.) and practised successfully in London 1825-32, with ideas on fresh air in advance of his times. Another innovation was to discard the traditional black coat and knee breeches of the physician for the ordinary dress of the day-blue coat with brass buttons and yellow waistcoat. But with characteristic fidelity he changed no more with the fashion, and his endeavour to avoid singularity in 1830 ended by making him more singular than ever in 1860. Inheriting a competency, he devoted himself to botany, specialising on the genus Carex, his Illustrations of which appeared 1858-67. He contributed a monograph of 158 species to Sir W. J. Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana; his collection he bequeathed to Kew. He became a member of the Linnean Society in 1819; secretary 1832-9, and treasurer 1856-61. [Back to chapter]
As having visited the country on the voyage of the Beagle. [Back to chapter]
Probably Louis Fraser, 1810-66, who was on the Niger Expedition of 1841-2 and afterwards took charge of Lord Derby’s zoological collections at Knowsley. [Back to chapter]
William Macleay, of Sydney, son of the Colonial Secretary, was a naturalist of some note, inventor of a now forgotten system of classification which posited the number 5 as the basis for the structure and grouping of all living things. [Back to chapter]
Elias Fries (1794-1878), a Swedish botanist, successively Professor (1834), Director of the Botanic Gardens (1859), and Rector of the University (1853) at Uppsala. He was an especial authority on the Cryptogams. [Back to chapter]
Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803-89), the great mycologist, was directed to Natural History by the influence of Henslow at Cambridge, finally devoting himself to the Cryptogams and especially to Fungi. In 1828 he first came into touch with Sir W. J. Hooker, for whom he described all the fungi in the volumes supplementary to The English Flora of J. E. Smith. For half a century all the exotic fungi received at Kew passed through his hands, and over 400 papers on fungi stand under his name, apart from those at which he worked in collaboration. His Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany (1857) remained for many years the standard book on the subject, while he was one of the pioneers of Plant pathology, popularly remembered as the investigator of the potato murrain in 1846. [Back to chapter]
Jean François Camille Montagne (1784-1866), botanist, was left fatherless very young, entered the French navy at 14, and took part in the expedition to Egypt. On his return to France in 1802 he studied medicine,- and in 1804 was attached as surgeon to a military hospital at Boulogne. He became chief surgeon to Murat’s army in 1815 and again in 1819, and in 1830 was head of the military hospital at Sedan. He left the army in 1832 and devoted himself to the study of cryptogams. Elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1853, and to other Societies, and received the cross of the Legion of Honour 1858. He contributed many papers to the Archives de Botanique and to the Annales des Sciences naturelles, besides working out the Plantae Cellulares for Webb and Berthelot’s Phytographia Conariensis, Dumont d’Urville’s Voyage au Pole Sud, Gay’s Historia fisica de Chile, etc., etc. [Back to chapter]
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