Alexander Whyte (naturalist)

Alexander Whyte (born 1834 in Fettercairn ; died 1908 in High Barnet , London) was a Scottish naturalist who worked as a government employee from 1891 to 1904 in Nyasaland , now Malawi , and Uganda , where he worked with plants and animals for the British Museum collected.

biography

Alexander Whyte was born in Fettercairn, Laurencekirk, Scotland in 1834 and attended the University of Aberdeen for training , where he focused on natural history and botany. Before the end of his studies, he traveled to Ceylon and the West Indies , where his family pursued economic interests, and put on scientific collections there. He stayed in Ceylon and settled in Colombo as a naturalist, in 1877 he was elected a member of the Zoological Society of London .

In 1890 Whyte returned to England and found a job at the British Foreign Office as a botanist and later as head of the scientific staff under the direction of Sir Henry Hamilton Johnston , the new Commissioner for British Central Africa (later Nyasaland and Malawi). Whyte also went to Nyasaland and helped set up the region's first botanical garden in Zomba . In the following years he collected plants and animals and sent many of the newly discovered species to the British Museum in London.

In 1894 Whyte became a member of the Linnean Society and an honorary member of the Zoological Society, in 1897 he was awarded the silver medal of the Zoological Society for his work in Africa. After a short stay in England he was placed under the government in Uganda and continued his collecting work there. In 1902 he became Director of Agriculture in British East Africa and resigned from this position after a few years. Before returning to England, he visited Liberia in 1904/1905 . In 1908 he died in High Barnet , London, at the age of 75.

Dedications

Whyte collected numerous plant and animal species and was often honored as the namesake of new animal and plant species. Oldfield Thomas , curator at the British Museum, named Lepus whytei , today a synonym or a subspecies of the Mozambique hare ( Lepus microtis ), and the Malawi gray mullet (now Fukomys whytei ) after him, Reginald Innes Pocock dedicated a subspecies of the southern green monkey to him ( Chlorocebus pygerythrus whytei ). Among the birds, George Ernest Shelley dedicated the mirror-bearded bird ( Stactolaema whytii ), the red -headed sylvietta ( Sylvietta whytii ) and the maidenhead Serinus whytii .

supporting documents

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Whyte, Alexander (1834-1908) at JSTOR Global Plants; accessed on October 4, 2017.
2. ^ "Whyte." In: Bo Beolens, Michael Grayson, Michael Watkins: The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009; P. 444; ISBN 978-0-8018-9304-9 .
3. ^ "Whyte." In: Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. Bloomsbury Publishing 2014; o. S.

literature

• “Whyte.” In: Bo Beolens, Michael Grayson, Michael Watkins: The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009; P. 444; ISBN 978-0-8018-9304-9 .
• "Whyte." In: Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. Bloomsbury Publishing 2014; o. S.