Dr Leach, at Baitsbite on the Cam. His first and best collection of insects was presented to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Other discoveries were made in after years, and are referred to by Jenyns.
On the death of Dr E. D. Clarke, he offered himself for the Professorship of Mineralogy. Chemistry, as well as the study of Minerals, now occupied his attention. He was only 26 years of age, and still B.A., when elected to that chair. At the age of 27 he published his Syllabus of Mineralogy in 1823, "A useful manual of reference to all persons studying Mineralogy, independently of the immediate circumstances which led to its publication[1]."
In 1827 Prof. Martyn died and Prof. Henslow was elected to the chair of Botany, being succeeded by Whewell on resigning the Professorship of Mineralogy. He now turned his attention to the study of Botany; but he never paid much heed to systematic botany, for his taste lay in the direction of what is now called Ecology. He then wrote "Botanists would rather receive one of our most common weeds from a newly-discovered or newly-explored country, than a new species of an already known genus. There are higher departments of Botany than mere collectors of specimens are aware of; for to ascertain the geographical distribution of a well-known species is a point of vastly superior interest to the mere acquisition of a rare specimen." À propos of this he made elaborate epitomes of the Botanical Geographies of De Candolle, and of the writings of Humboldt, Poiret and others. His MS. is not unlike a forerunner of Schimper's Botanical Geography of to-day. He thus expressed himself in the Introduction to his Descriptive and Physiological Botany (1836): in the second section headed Botany..."This enquiry should extend as well to the investigation of the outward forms [of plant organs] and the conditions in which plants, whether recent or fossil, are met with, as to the examination of the various functions which they perform whilst in the living state and to the laws by which their distribution on the earth's surface is regulated." Again, in the Preface to the Flora of Suffolk by himself and E. S. Skepper,
- ↑ Memoir,p. 29.
