George Bentham

George Bentham was an English botanist, born in Stoke, Plymouth, on 22 September 1800 and described by the weed botanist Duane Isely as the premier systematic botanist of the nineteenth century. He was the son of the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham and the botanist and author Mary Sophia Bentham, and he had no formal education but a remarkable aptitude for languages. He initially studied law but pursued a fascination with botany, becoming president of the Linnaean Society in 1861 and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1862. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1866. He authored a number of important botanical works, particularly floras, and is best known for his taxonomic classification of plants in collaboration with Joseph Dalton Hooker in the Genera Plantarum, published from 1862 to 1883. He died in London in 1884.