Manchester Memoirs, fW. Ixiii. (1918) No. 1 



I. — The Herbarium of John Dalton. 



KY 



R. S. Adamson, M.A., and Alison McK. Crabtree. 

 Read February 4th, igiQ. 

 Received for publication, February 4th, 1919. 



This herbarium, consisting of eleven volumes of plants dried and 

 mounted by John Dalton, has been in the possession of the Literary 

 and Philosophical Society since 1886. For some reason, however, it 

 seems to have been almost entirely overlooked since then, and had, 

 unfortunately, been allowed to become exceedingly dirty, and to some 

 extent damaged by insects and damp. 



The collection was made between the years 1790 and 1828, at the 

 time, that is, of the great outburst of interest and activity in systematic 

 botany that followed on the work of Linnaeus and preceded the 

 awakening of morphology and physiology. 



Of Dalton's knowledge of botany, and its origin, little seems known. 

 He apparently taught himself as he did in other branches. This., 

 science probably brought him into touch with the well-known blind 

 botanist, John Gough, whom Dalton knew during all the time of his. 

 residence in Kendal, 1 781- 1793, and with whom he kept up an, 

 intercourse long afterwards. 



In his younger days Dalton was evidently much interested in plants 

 and, as this collection testifies, attained a very considerable deforce of 

 skill in distinguishing and determining species. That he left this 

 subject for those sciences with which his name is more definitely 

 associated is perhaps not to be wondered at when we remember the 

 position of botanical science at the close of the eighteenth century. 

 The science was completely under the influence of the Linnsean 

 school, and derived its sole inspiration from the then recently published 

 works of the master. Structural and physiological botany were wholly 

 neglected, and geographical botany can hardly be said to have been 

 born till 1805, when Humboldt and Bonpland's work appeared. 

 Botany, indeed, consisted of exact floristic studies, that is to say, of 

 identification and differentiation of species. Though the flora of this 

 country and foreign regions was quite as much studied, if not more, 

 then than nowadays, the result was merely the production of a 



