34 
The Queensland Naturalist August, 1932 
THE CONTRIBUTION OF 1 SOME WOMEN TO THE 
STUDY OF BOTANY. 
(By Mrs. Estelle Thomson) 
Presidential Address delivered before the Queensland 
Naturalists’ Club, 13th February, 1932. 
In offering these few notes on some women who have 
contributed towards the study of Botany I would say at 
the outset that it is not in any sense my intention to 
attempt to prove that this contribution is either a weighty 
or a bulky one. It is, in fact, a very small one indeed, 
and on that account perhaps liable to be overlooked. 
I have purposely avoided the use of the term “women, 
botanists,” for it is not to the splendid work of such 
trained botanists as Dr. Jean White-Hainey and Dr. E. J. 
McLennan, to mention only two of a considerable and 
important list, that I mean to draw attention. Rather I 
have tried to find out a little about the amateur students 
of Botany who, by collecting, by drawing, by preparing 
and mounting microscope sections, and by publishing 
more or less popular works on the subject, have made their 
small contribution towards the study of plant life. 
Having started to investigate the subject fully pre- 
pared to do a good deal of research in order to disinter 
some details of the lives of these women from their dusty 
oblivion, it was disappointing to find the results so meagre. 
Tn almost every case I am indebted to the late Mr. J. H. 
Maiden, for my information drawn from his papers on 
the Great Australian Botanists. 
Before mentioning those few women who have done 
independent work of sufficiently enduring value to merit 
the inclusion of their names in Mr. Maiden’s list, we might 
consider in passing those women who have in another way 
made their contribution to this science in particular — I 
mean the wives and sisters, the female relatives, in fact 
— of the men who have built up the science of Modern 
Botany as it stands to-day. 
Biography of the briefer sort is usually silent as to 
the domestic life of great men, but when we read a more 
detailed life of some of these it becomes evident that their 
domestic relations had a marked effect on their public or 
scientific life. 
Charles Darwin was helped in this way both by his 
wife and by one of his daughters-! n-law who drew some 
of the illustrations for his “Climbing Plants.” “Insect- 
ivorous Plants” and “Forms of Flowers.” Mrs. Darwin 
