Education
Anderson studied at Edinburgh University.
Anderson studied at Edinburgh University.
He was appointed in 1785 superintendent of the government botanic garden at Saint Vincent, where he showed much activity. He was a correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks, through whom he contributed to the Royal Society in 1789 an account of a bituminous lake on Saint Vincent, which was afterwards published in the Philosophical Transactions for that year. In January 1791 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, proposed by Daniel Rutherford, John Walker and William Wright.
In the same year he went into Guiana on a botanising expedition.
The plants he obtained being sent to Banks, are now in the herbarium of the British Museum. He contemplated the production of a flora of the Caribbean islands, some sheets of which he sent to Banks.
But this project was never carried out. He resigned his post in July 1811, and died on 8 September in the same year (the Royal Society of Edinburgh gives his date of death as 10 May 1811).