Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
History
Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
Botanists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Botany -- Great Britain -- History
The "Floristic" works of Sir William Hooker began with the second
edition of Curtis's _Flora Londinensis_, in five folio volumes, upon
which he worked from 1817 to 1828. He contributed a large proportion
of the plates from his own drawings, while the descriptions throughout
(excepting those of the plates on Algae and Fungi by R. K. Greville)
were enlarged, and rewritten by him. He was in fact the real author of
the work, which, however, was so badly edited--even the letter-press
was not paged--that citation of it was impossible, and it never took
its proper place as a scientific work. Sir Joseph Hooker points out
that the second edition was not properly styled _Flora Londinensis_,
since it included many species which are not indigenous anywhere near
London. But these were the lapses of the editor, not of the author
and artist. Minor works were the accounts of the plants collected on
Parry's and Sabine's Arctic voyages (1823-28), but the _Flora Boreali
Americana_ was a more important undertaking. It appeared as two quarto
volumes (1829-40), in which 2500 species were described with numerous
illustrations. It was based on the collections of various travellers,
and included ferns and their allies. In 1830 came the first edition of
the _British Flora_, a work which was continued through eight editions,
the last being in 1860, and it contained 1636 species. The botanical
results of Beechey's voyage in the "Blossom" to the Behring Sea, the
Pacific Ocean, and China were produced jointly with Dr Walker-Arnott
in 1830-41, as a quarto volume, with descriptions of about 2700
species, and notable for the diversity of the floras included. In 1849
the _Niger Flora_ appeared, dealing with the collections of Vogel on
the Niger expedition of 1841. But the most remarkable of all these
floristic works was the great series of the _Icones Plantarum_. It was
initiated in 1837 for the illustration of _New and rare plants selected
from the Author's Herbarium_, and was continued by him till his death
in 1865. Owing to the munificence of Bentham's bequest to the Kew
Herbarium for its continuance and illustration, it remains still as the
principal channel for the description and delineation of new and rare
plants from the Kew Herbarium. The fact that the number of the plates
is now about 3000 gives some idea of the magnitude of this work, which
was started by Sir William Hooker in the later days of his Glasgow
professorship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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