BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE EARLY BOTANISTS, ETC. 69 



IV. — Biographical Notes on the Early Botanists of North- 

 umberland and Durham. By J. G. Baker, F.R.S., 

 F.L.S. 



These notes on the early workers at botany in the north- 

 eastern counties of England are put together at the instigation 

 of the late Mr. Richard Howse. I gave a similar sketch of the 

 Yorkshire botanists in my presidential address at the Barnsley 

 meeting of the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union in 1884, which is 

 printed in the first volume of their botanical transactions 

 pp. 185-201, and for Cumberland and Westmorland in my 

 "Flora of the English Lake District," also published in 1885. 

 To some extent the present paper will relate to the same men 

 as those who worked the adjoining counties, but in other 

 cases those who have collected in Northumberland and 

 Durham have not extended their researches beyond the limits 

 of the two counties. The botanists fall naturally into two 

 groups, those who lived before Linnsus, and those who lived 

 and wrote after the introduction of the binominal nomen- 

 clature. 



Part I.— THE PRE-LINNEAN AUTHORS. 



William Turner, born about 15 10, died 1568. The title 

 of the Father of English Botany may be justly claimed for 

 William Turner, who was born at Morpeth about the year 

 1 5 10. Under the patronage of Lord Wentworth he was sent 

 to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree 

 in 1529-30, and his M.A. in 1533. He was appointed Junior 

 Treasurer of his College in 1532, a Fellow in 1531, and took 

 Holy Orders in 1536-7. Writing in 1568, he says (I have 

 modernised the spelling), " For I am able to prove, by good 

 witnesses, that I have about thirty years ago written an 

 Herbal in Latin, wherein were contained the Greek, Latin, 

 and English names of so many herbs and trees as I could get 

 any knowledge of, even being yet Fellow of Pembroke Hall, 

 in Cambridge, where I could learn never one Greek, neither 



