Sir James Edward Smith was a very influential and enthusiastic botanist indeed, who used his family wealth - his father was a successful Norwich wool merchant - for the considerable betterment of the science.
Born in 1759 he was the star botany student in the Edinburgh Uni medical course, but there are suggestions that his primary interest in the subject was its botany component. Either way his passions increasingly tended towards botany and away from medicine. At a young age he founded the Natural History Society of Edinburgh.
It's often on seemingly unlikely combinations of events that history makes its turns, changing lives and the course of science itself in a given place. So it was with young Smith. When Carl Linnaeus the younger died in 1783, his widow wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, doyen of British botany at the time, asking him to buy his library and specimens – 9000 plants and some 3500 animals - for the enormous sum of a thousand guineas. Smith just happened to be breakfasting with Banks when the letter arrived (this was not an unusual occurrence, as Banks was a great encourager of young up-and-comers). Banks was unwilling or unable to raise the funds, but certainly recognised the immense value of the collection. He persuaded the young Smith, just 24 at the time, to find the money, presumably having a pretty fair idea of the Smith family fortunes. Smith in turn persuaded his father to advance him a loan. It took time, but he came round (just in time to pip the Empress of Russia who also fancied the trove) and the 26 cases arrived in England the following year – to the frustration of Swedish science. One story, which appears in a book written after Smith's death by his wife Pleasance, claims that the King of Sweden, who was in France at the time and heard about it too late, tried to fetch them back via the navy, but they failed to catch up to the ship.
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| Acmena smithii, family Myrtaceae, Lilly Pilly. This rainforest small tree from coastal New South Wales was named by French botanist, Jean Louis Marie Poiret, Smith's contemporary, in his honour. The berries make excellent jam - and I hasten to say I collect mine from my in-laws' garden, not the wild! |
He moved to bigger premises and founded the very influential Linnaean Society in 1788 around the collection, dedicating it to public good. Indeed, his enthusiasm and easy communication skills are said to have done much to popularise botany in Britain at the time. He was the Society's President for the next 40 years, the rest of his life in fact; it is now the world’s oldest natural history society.
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| Eucalyptus smithii, Gully Gum, Bowral, New South Wales. These trees were in fact presiding over a most memorable outdoor Leonard Cohen concert; not sure what Sir James would have made of it... And I must acknowledge that while I had believed until now that the tree was named for Sir James, extra research I've done for this posting suggests that in fact Australian botanist and eucalypt chemist Richard Baker named it for his colleague Henry Smith. I'm not totally sure though, so I'll let the picture stand, with that proviso. |
He wrote the huge 36 volume British Botany over 24 years from 1790 (it was this that earned him his knighthood) and the English Flora in the 1820s. When he died the Society bought the Linnaeus collection for £3000 - a debt that it took them over 30 years to pay off.
Very few Australian plants seem to have been named for Smith, though he himself named very many of them for his fellow British and European botanists. Keep an eye out for the cryptic little 'Sm.' that follows the name of many Australian plants - it indicates that Smith was their author.
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| Sowerbaea juncea Sm., Rush Lily, family Anthericaceae, Ulladulla, coastal New South Wales. Named by Smith for botanical artist James Sowerby, with whom he often collaborated. |
I wonder how the course of British botany and the scientific institutions of the early nineteenth century might have been different if James Smith had breakfasted elsewhere on that fateful morning in 1783?
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