Jacob Bobart the Younger

Jacob Bobart the Younger was an English botanist who lived from 1641 to 1719. The younger son of Jacob Bobart, he was born at Oxford and succeeded his father as superintendent of the Physic Garden there. When Robert Morison died in 1683 he lectured as botanical professor, and in 1699 he brought out the third part of Morison's Historia Plantarum. He built up a hortus siccus, a dried plant collection in twelve folio volumes that is kept at the garden, and he left annotated copies of Bauhin's Pinax and of the Oxford Garden catalogue. A story told in notes on Hudibras credits him with a hoax in which a dead rat was altered to look like a dragon and was taken seriously by learned men until he owned the trick. William Sherard, his former pupil, wrote that Bobart was made to resign his chair in 1719, the year he died, and the genus Bobartia was named by Linnaeus in honour of the two Bobarts.