George Bentham

Botanist, born in Stoke, Devon, SW England, UK, the son of Samuel Bentham. Abandoning law for botany, he was secretary of the Horticultural Society of London (1829–40), and compiled, with Sir Joseph Hooker, the great Genera Plantarum (3 vols, 1862–83), among many other important botanical works.

George Bentham (September 22, 1800–September 10, 1884) was an English botanist, perhaps the greatest systematic botanist of the 19th century.

He was born in Stoke near Portsmouth. His father, Sir Samuel Bentham, was the only brother of Jeremy Bentham. George Bentham had neither a school nor a college education, but at an early age acquired the power of giving sustained and concentrated attention to any subject that occupied him. At the close of the war with France, the Benthams made a long tour through that country, staying two years at Montauban, where Bentham studied Hebrew and mathematics in the Protestant Theological School.

George Bentham became attracted to botanical studies by applying to them his uncle’s logical methods, and not by any special interest in natural history. de Candolle’s Flore française, and he became interested in the analytical tables for identifying plants. In 1826, at the pressing invitation of his uncle, he agreed to act as his secretary, at the same time entering at Lincolns Inn and reading for the bar. He was called in due time and in 1832 held his first and last brief. The same year Jeremy Bentham died, leaving his property to his nephew. For a time these were divided between botany, jurisprudence and logic, in addition to editing his father’s professional papers.

Bentham’s first publication was his Catalogue des plantes indigènes des Pyrénées et du Bas Languedoc (Paris, 1826), the result of a careful exploration of the Pyrenees in company with G. It is interesting to notice that in it Bentham adopted the principle from which he never deviated, of citing nothing at second-hand. This was followed by articles on various legal subjects: on codification, in which he disagreed with his uncle, on the laws affecting larceny and on the law of real property. This Stanley Jevons declared to be undoubtedly the most fruitful discovery made in abstract logical science since the time of Aristotle. The following winter was passed in Vienna, where he produced his Commentationes de Leguminosarum generibus, published in the annals of the Vienna Museum.

In 1854 he found the maintenance of a herbarium and library too expensive. At the same time he contemplated the abandonment of botanical work. In 1855 he took up his residence in London, and worked at Kew for five days a week, with a brief summer holiday, from this time onwards till the end of his life.

In 1857 the government sanctioned a scheme for the preparation of a series of Floras or descriptions in the English language of the indigenous plants of British colonies and possessions. Bentham began with the Flora Hongkongensis in 1861, which was the first comprehensive work on any part of the little-known flora of China and Hong Kong, including Hong Kong Croton. This was followed by the Flora Australiensis, in seven volumes (1863-1878), the first flora of any large continental area that had ever been finished. His greatest work was the Genera Plantarum, begun in 1862, and concluded in 1883 in collaboration with Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker.

Bentham was awarded the Clarke Medal by the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1879.

The standard author abbreviation Benth. may be used to indicate this person in citing a botanical name.