Humphry Marshall

Humphry Marshall (also Humphrey Marshall, born October 10, 1722 in West Bradford , Province of Pennsylvania , † November 5, 1801 there ) was an American botanist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Marshall "; The abbreviation “ Marsh. “Used.

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He was the eighth child of Abraham Marshall and Mary Marshall (née Hunt). His parents were Quakers and immigrants from Derbyshire , England . At the age of 12 he began an apprenticeship as a bricklayer . He was much more interested in natural history, however, and henceforth continued his education by studying the few books he could get in Chester County . Encouraged by his cousin John Bartram, who was a botanist , Marshall developed into a botanist and natural historian through self-study in the mid-1730s. He began to make friends with other scientists in America and overseas. He was in contact with the American botanists Thomas Parke, Benjamin Franklin, George Logan, Joseph Storrs, Timothy Pickering, John Dickinson and Caspar Wistar, with the British botanists John Fothergill, Peter Collinson, Joseph Banks and John Coakley Lettsom, with French scientists and Plant collectors like Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur and Conrad-Alexandre Gérard, but also to German, Dutch, Swedish and Irish botanists.

On September 16, 1748 he married Sarah Pennock (* around 1720, † 1766) and took over his father's farm near the western course of the Brandywine River. In the following years he was very busy working for the farm; however, he continued to use free time to continue his botanical research. At the end of the 1750s he began to exchange the specimens of plants he had collected in the region with other scientists in America and Great Britain ; In return, he received scientific equipment, books, exotic plant specimens, money or tradable goods such as linen. When he significantly enlarged his father's farmhouse in 1764, he also added a greenhouse for growing rare plants; it would have been the first of its kind in Chester County.

After his father's death in 1767, Marshall had a sizable inheritance that enabled him to devote more time and dedication to botany. By this time his correspondence with the British botanist John Fothergill had already become a close friendship. Fothergill encouraged Marshall to collect plants outside of Chester County and gave him financial support to do so. Fothergill brokered Marshall's collecting services to other botanists and plant collectors and thus secured Marshall's income. A few years later, Marshall was sure that he could rely financially on the collection and cultivation of plants alone. His plant business flourished thanks to a network of acquaintances through family members, Quakers, and scientist friends.

In 1772 Marshall established a botanical garden on his property and stocked it with all kinds of local plants and as many exotic plants as he could get. The very next year he started building another house next to the botanical garden.

Marshall's works include works on turtles, sunspots, and agriculture; his main work, however, is Arbustrum americanum ... , which was probably the first botanical treatise that a native North American wrote about American plants. Although the work did not sell well in the USA, it increased Marshall's reputation among his European colleagues.

After his first wife died, he married Margaret Minshall (1774-1823) on January 10, 1788. Like his first marriage, this one too remained childless. In the last two years of his life he suffered from cataracts , which severely reduced his eyesight. He died in 1801.

Works

• Arbustrum americanum ... , 1785

Web links

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Humphry Marshall at the IPNI