Background

George Bentham was born on September 22, 1800, in Stoke, Plymouth. He was the third child and second son of Samuel Bentham and Maria Sophia Fordyce. His father, inspector-general of naval works, was ennobled in 1809; his mother was the eldest daughter of Dr. George Fordyce, F.R.S., a noted physician. Jeremy Bentham, the well-known authority on jurisprudence and ethics, was his uncle.

Education

Bentham’s early education was rather sporadic, largely because of the peripatetic family life, and was provided mainly by private tutors. During his father’s tour of duty in St. Petersburg from 1805 to 1807, his precocity was evidenced in the ease with which he acquired conversational proficiency in Russian, French, and German and a knowledge of Latin. Later, in France, Bentham attended the faculty of theology at Montauban, where he studied French and Latin literature, natural philosophy, mathematics, and Hebrew, while indulging his tastes for music and drawing. Later in life he was able to read botanical works in fourteen languages, and it is a tribute to his industry, concentration, and high powers of reception that he did so largely by his own efforts.

Bentham studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, and in November 1831, was called to the bar. However, in 1833, possessed of adequate wealth inherited from his father and his uncle, he determined to give up the legal profession for botany. Bentham received the Legum Doctor degree from Cambridge in 1874.

Career

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. A. Walker Arnott (1799–1868). 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. But the most remarkable production of this period was the Outline of a new system of logic, with a critical examination of Dr Whately's Elements of Logic (1827).

In 1836 he published his Labiatarum genera et species. In preparing this work he visited, between 1830–1834, every European herbarium, several more than once. The following winter was passed in Vienna, where he produced his Commentationes de Leguminosarum generibus, published in the annals of the Vienna Museum. In 1842 he moved to Pontrilas in Herefordshire. His chief occupation for the next few years was his contributions to the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis, which was being carried on by his friend, A. P. de Candolle. In all these dealt with some 4, 730 species.

From 1829 to 1840 he was an extremely energetic and conscientious honorary secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society and, with John Lindley, steered its affairs through a very critical period.

In 1844, he provided the botanical descriptions for The Botany of the Voyage of H. M. S. Sulphur.

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 Joseph Dalton Hooker.

Achievements

• Bentham is most famous for his extensive and excellent classification of plants, especially angiosperms, along with Hooker, forming the "Bentham & Hooker system", which was published in three volumes as Genera Plantarum.
  
  Bentham received many honors in recognition of his scientific achievements. In 1828 he was admitted as a fellow of the Linnean Society, of which he became president in 1861; in 1863 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, having been awarded the Society’s Royal Medal in 1859.
  
  He received the Legum Doctor degree from Cambridge in 1874, and five years later was admitted to the Companionship of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. His foreign awards included the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1879.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Handbook of the British Flora

    (Vol. 2)

    1858
  • Illustrations of the British flora: a series of wood engravings 1880
  • Flora Hongkongensis: A Description of the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the Island of Hongkong 1861
  • On the Recent Progress and Present State of Systematic Botany. A rare original article from the British Association for the Advancement of Science report 1874
  • Genera Plantarum Ad Exemplaria Imprimis in Herbariis Kewensibus Servata Definita 1883
  • Flora australiensisa description of the plants of the Australian territory 1863
  • Outline of a New System of Logic: With a Critical Examination of Dr. Whately's Elements of Logic 1827
  • Notes on Gramineae 1881
  • Catalogue Des Plantes Indigènes Des Pyrénées Et Du Bas Languedoc: Voyage Botanique Fait Dans Les Pyrénées 1825
  • Essai Sur La Nomenclature Et La Classification Des Principales Branches D'art Et Science 1823
  • Notes On Orchideae 1881

• pamphlet

  • Anniversary Meeting of the Linnean Society of London, Friday, May 24, 1867 1867

Views

Bentham's life spanned the Darwinian revolution, and his young colleague Joseph Dalton Hooker was Darwin's closest friend and one of the first to accept Darwin's ideas. Until then, Bentham unquestioningly believed that species were fixed. In 1874 he wrote that "Fifteen years have sufficed to establish a theory [of evolution by natural selection]". Bentham's conversion to the new line of thought was complete, and included a change from typology in taxonomy to an appreciation that "We cannot form an idea of a species from a single individual, nor of a genus from a single one of its species."

Quotations: "I decided that my means were sufficient to enable me to devote myself to botany, a determination which I never, during the long period of my subsequent career, had on any occasion any reason to repent of."

"I first began to dry specimens for preservation carelessly perhaps at first, but before the season was over, I had collected between one and two hundred species."

Membership

Bentham was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1866. In 1828 he was admitted as a fellow of the Linnean Society. He was also a member of the Royal Horticultural Society and in 1863 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

• 

  Royal Society of London , United Kingdom

  1863 - 1884

Personality

Bentham first became interested in botany at the age of seventeen, during travels in France, where he and his parents lived for eleven years. It was the encouragement of his mother, who was an accomplished gardener and a knowledgeable botanist, and access to her copy of Alphonse de Candolle’s Flore française, whose analytical keys for the identification of plants appealed to his orderly mind, that fostered a penchant for systematic botany which became his consuming interest for over fifty years and to which he made outstanding contributions.

Later in life, Bentham was known as one of the most unassuming of men, always regarding himself as an amateur and reluctant to accept any honor, yet a man who in his lucid, concise, and accurate writing did immense service to systematic botany.

Connections

On 11 April 1833 Bentham married Sarah, daughter of Harford Brydges, onetime British envoy to Persia. They had no children.

Father:

Samuel Bentham

Mother:

Mary Sophia Bentham

c. 1765 – 1858

Wife:

Sarah Jones

Uncle:

Jeremy Bentham

He was the well-known authority on jurisprudence and ethics.

colleague:

Joseph Hooker

Bentham's life spanned the Darwinian revolution, and his young colleague Joseph Dalton Hooker was Darwin's closest friend and one of the first to accept Darwin's ideas.

References

• George Bentham
  2011
• George Bentham: Autobiography, 1800-1834 In this autobiography of his early life (1800-1834), George Bentham, nephew of the great Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, offers a lively depiction of the times, both in England and on the Continent, particularly of post-Napoleonic France, where he lived with his family for twelve years. Returning to London as his uncle Jeremy's assistant, he recounts his experiences in this role and his encounters with many of the leading, and the rising,
  1997