238 



JOHN GILBERT I3AKE11. 

 (1834-1920.) 



By the Editor. 



By tlie death of John Gilbert Baker at his house at Kew on the 

 16th of last month, one of the few remaining Hnks which connect 

 the past and present readers of this Journal has been broken. Fronr 

 the Hrst number (published in 1863) until the last volume but one 

 (1918) his name has been of frequent recurrence of these pages; the 

 British botanists with whom he was intimately and constantly asso- 

 ciated here and elsewhere — Babington, Newbould, Syme, Trimen, 

 Townsend, to mention only a few of the more prominent — had 

 long pre-deceased him ; the number of those who knew him in the 

 days of his activity grows fewer year by year, and to the younger 

 generations he, like those just mentioned, is little more than a name. 

 Yet for those who survive, and for others who may be interested in 

 the history of British botany, some record seems demanded, and this 

 may perhaps best be supplied by one who, for a long course of years, 

 has been familiar with the man and his work. 



John Gilbert Baker was born at Guisbro' in the Cleveland dis- 

 trict of Yorkshire on Jan. 13, 1834 ; in the August of that year the 

 family removed to Thirsk, where he was later established in business. 

 He was educated at the Friends' Schools at Ackworth and York ; 

 while at the former (in 1846) he began collecting j^lants, and in the 

 following year became curator of the herbarium, at the well-known 

 school at Bootham, whose Nature Study Society — the first of its 

 kind, established in 1836 — has implanted in so many of its alumni 

 tastes which have been developed in later years. His first published 

 note Avas a brief record of Carex Persoo)iii in the Phyfologist for 

 1850 (iii. 738), to which periodical he became a frequent contributor. 



In 1854, being then of the age of twenty, Baker published his 

 first independent work — A Supjjlement to JBaines's Flora of York- 

 shire : the introductory matter includes an outline of the relations of 

 the physical geography of the county to its vegetation — a subject 

 treated at considerable length in his important volume on North 

 Yorkshire (1863), of which a second edition (completed in 1906) 

 was published in the Transactions of the Yorkshire Natitralists'' 

 Union. Botanical geography and plant distribution were among 

 B iker's favourite subjects, and furnished the theme for several of his 

 papers ; in 1875 he published a very useful little volume entitled 

 Elementary Lessons in Botanical Geocfraphy^ which had previously 

 appeared in serial form in The Gardeners^ Chronicle. In that 

 journal also appeared his paper on the botany and physical geography 

 of the Holy Land, but this, although not published until 1917, had 

 been written many years before. 



In 1859 a Botanical Exchange Club — the origin of the body still 



bearing that name — was established in connection with the Thii-sk 



Natural History Society ; for this Baker wrote the Keports and acted 



as distributor. In the following year he married Hannah Unthank, of 



Journal of Botany. — Vol. b'^. [Octojjer, 1920.] t 



