Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/King, George
KING, Sir GEORGE (1840–1909), Indian botanist, son of Robert King and Cecilia Anderson, was born at Peterhead, where his father was a bookseller, on 12 April 1840. King's father soon moved to Aberdeen, and with an older brother, George, who was the boy's godfather, founded the publishing firm of G. and R. King. Both brothers possessed literary aptitudes, the elder writing much on social and religious subjects and the younger compiling a meritorious history of 'The Covenanters in the North.' King's father died, aged thirty-six, in 1845 and his mother five years later. Thereupon King became his uncle's ward, and, after passing through the grammar school, where Mr. (subsequently Sir) W. D. Geddes was his form master, in 1854 joined his uncle's business. At school King showed a marked predilection for natural science; and on coming of age in 1861 left his uncle's service for the University of Aberdeen in order to study medicine as an avenue to a scientific career. There King came under the influence of the botanist George Dickie [q. v.], and, becoming his assistant, devoted all his spare time to botanical work. Graduating as M.B. with highest academical honours in 1865, King on 2 Oct. entered the Indian medical service, and reached India on 11 April 1866. In 1868 he was temporarily appointed to the Saharanpur Botanic Garden, and next year joined the Indian forest service. His efficiency in these positions led the duke of Argyll, secretary of state for India, to promote him in March 1871 to the post of superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta, and of cinchona cultivation in Bengal. The Calcutta garden had been seriously damaged by two great cyclones in 1864 and 1867, but King completely renovated it, formed an adequate herbarium collection to replace that dispersed by the East India Company in 1828, and organised a botanical survey of India, of which in 1891 he became the first director. As manager of the cinchona department King substituted quinine-yielding cinchonas for the poorer kinds previously grown, inaugurated in 1887 an economic method of separating quinine, and established in 1893 a method of distributing the drug on self-supporting lines at a low price. Both the governments of Bengal and of India recognised King's administrative capacity. On their behalf he acted as a visitor of the Bengal Engineering College, as a manager of the Calcutta Zoological Gardens, and as a trustee of the Indian Museum. He was created C.I.E. in 1890 and K.C.I.E. in 1898. The humane services which he rendered in connection with quinine were acknowledged by the grade of Officier d'Instruction Publique and by the gift of a ring of honour from the Czar Alexander III.
King's early writings, mainly official reports and contributions to the journals of learned societies, although scanty, were sufficiently valuable to lead his university to confer on him the degree of LL.D. in 1884. He was elected F.R.S. in 1887. In the same year he founded the 'Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta,' to which, during the next eleven years, he contributed a series of monographs of Ficus, Quercus, Castanopsis, Artocarpus, Myristica, Anonaceæ, and Orchidaceæ, marked by a lucidity and completeness which placed him among the foremost systematic writers of his time. In 1889 he further undertook a sustained study of the flora of the Malayan Peninsula; ten parts of his 'Materials' for a Flora of the region were issued before 1898.
King retired from India on 28 Feb. 1898. Failing health thenceforth reduced his public activity, although in 1899 he was president of the botanical section of the British Association at Dover. Under medical advice he mainly resided at San Remo, where he prosecuted his Malayan studies, but each summer he worked at Kew. With the co-operation of various botanists he carried his Malayan research to the end of the twenty-first part, the revision of which had just been completed when he died of an apolectic seizure at San Remo on 12 Feb. 1909. A memorial tablet marked his burial place there and records his philanthropic labours. King's services to botanical science were recognised by the award of medals by the University of Upsala, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Horticultural Society.
King married, in 1868, Jane Anne, daughter of Dr. G. J. Nicol, Aberdeen; she died in 1898. Of their two sons the elder, Robert, became an officer in the royal engineers.
A bronze medallion portrait, by F. Bowcher, was presented by Indian friends in 1899 to the Zoological Garden, Calcutta, a replica being placed in the Calcutta Botanic Garden. A copy, formerly in King's possession, is now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.
[Obituary notice by the present writer in Proc. Roy. Soc. vol. 81, p. xi, based on official notifications, original papers, and the memoranda and letters of King's relatives and friends; Kew Bulletin, 1909, pp. 193-7, for bibliography.]