|
James Edward Smith, the son of a wealthy Norfolk woollen draper, was educated privately in Norwich where Humphry Repton (1752 -1818) was one of his boyhood friends. He later attended the University of Edinburgh to study botany under Dr John Hope (1725-86), curator of the Royal Botanic Garden, as part of his medical training. In 1783 he went to London as a pupil of the anatomist John Hunter (1728-93) and Dr. David Pitcairn (1749-1809) of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), President of the Royal Society and England's leading botanist, soon befriended him. In December 1783 Banks advised Smith to take the opportunity of purchasing Carl Linnaeus's herbarium that had been offered to Banks by Linnaeus's widow. Smith's success in completing the purchase of the Linnaean Herbarium with his father's financial assistance placed him in a privileged position: his ownership of an unrivalled scientific collection and associated library led to him being consulted by numerous botanists and horticulturists. Throughout his later life he was able to build up by purchase, exchange and bequest a comprehensive personal herbarium, the Smith Herbarium: After Smith's death, the two collections were purchased by the Linnean Society of London, which Smith had helped to found in 1788 and of which he was the first President.
It is not perhaps generally known that a significant part of the Smith Herbarium consists of vouchers' of plants cultivated in various important private and public gardens in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Linnean Society's Smith Herbarium remains at premises in Burlington House, Piccadilly, whereas the Liverpool Botanic Garden's Smith Herbarium was transferred in 1909 to the Liverpool City Museum and is now incorporated into the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside.
|
|
Order