James Petiver

James Petiver, who lived from about 1665 to 1718, was a London apothecary and a fellow of the Royal Society, famous for the natural history specimen collections in which he traded and for his study of botany and entomology. Born in Hillmorton, Warwickshire, he was apprenticed to an apothecary in 1677, became a freeman of the Society of Apothecaries in 1685 and set up his own practice on Aldersgate in 1692. He belonged to the informal Temple Coffee House Botany Club and built a global network of collectors, with nearly 80 correspondents in America alone, publishing catalogues of his collections from 1695. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1695, was appointed apothecary to the Charterhouse in 1700 and received an honorary degree from the University of Leiden after visiting the Netherlands in 1711. He recorded and coined English names for butterflies, naming the white admiral and the fritillary, and wrote some of the first butterfly books to use English names. The genus Petiveria was named in his honour by Charles Plumier, and after his death Sir Hans Sloane bought his collections, part of which is now in the Natural History Museum.