Johann Jacob Dillenius

Johann Jacob Dillenius (1684 to 1747) was a German botanist known for his Hortus Elthamensis on the rare plants around Eltham, London, and for his Historia muscorum, a natural history of lower plants including mosses, liverworts, hornworts, lycopods, algae, lichens and fungi. Born at Darmstadt and educated at the University of Giessen, he moved to England in 1721 at the urging of the botanist William Sherard. In 1734 he was appointed the first Sherardian professor of botany at Oxford, as Sherard's will required. At Giessen he printed in 1719 a flora of the university's surroundings with figures he had drawn and engraved himself, and in 1724 he published the third edition of John Ray's Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum, which remained a standard reference for British botanists until Linnaeus. For the Hortus Elthamensis of 1732, a catalogue of some 400 plants in two volumes, he drew and engraved 324 plates.