Robert Kaye Greville

Robert Kaye Greville, around 1863

Robert Kaye Greville (born December 13, 1794 in Bishop Auckland , Durham , † June 4, 1866 in Murrayfield ) was a British botanist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is “ Grev. “Greville had been a member of the Leopoldina and the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 1821 .

Life

Robert Kaye Greville was a son of Robert Greville, who later was principal at Wyaston , Derbyshire , where the son received his first instruction. Even as a teenager he had a preference for studying plants, before he knew that books on botany existed, and by the time he was 19 he had drawn and colored almost 200 plants based on living specimens. Although he intended Medicine to study and attended to this end four years the universities London and Edinburgh . But since his interest in botany had increased and he had also become more independent, he finally gave up studying medicine without attaining a doctorate in it and devoted himself entirely to botany in the hope of one day getting a professorship.

On October 17, 1816, Greville married Charlotte Eden, daughter of Sir John Eden of Windlestone , County Durham . In the same year he moved to Edinburgh , where he worked under Dr. Barclay studied anatomy and comparative anatomy . Here he made the acquaintance of George Arnott Walker-Arnott , later professor of botany in Glasgow , and laid the foundation for his anatomical-botanical studies. In 1819 he became a member of the Wernerian Society . As early as the following year, he gave this a paper on algae , as he later published numerous works on ferns , mosses , lichens , algae and diatoms in the treatises of this society ( Transactions of the Wernerian Society ). At that time he also met Sir William Jackson Hooker , with whom he undertook various botanical excursions at the time and with whom he later published his main work on ferns. He also carried out such excursions in the company of Robert Graham and other botanists and proved to be a talented, critical observer and persistent hiker. In 1821 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

In 1823 Greville began to publish his outstanding work on Scottish cryptogams under the title Scottish Cryptogamic Flora , which he continued in monthly issues for five years, until it comprised six strong volumes. Greville dedicated it to his friend Hooker. Since the study of cryptogams was still very poorly pursued at that time, he contributed a great deal to the knowledge of these plants through the publication of these splendid illustrations and careful work containing exemplary analyzes that he himself had done. After years of researching the area around Edinburgh in botanical terms, he published his Flora Edinensis in 1824 , which includes the phanerogams and cryptogams. This work, which was dedicated to Robert Graham, is based on the botanical systematics introduced by Carl von Linné and contains four illustrations designed by the author that show details of cryptogamous structures. Also in 1824 was Greville's appointment to an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Glasgow .

Regardless of his thorough botanical studies, which prompted him to keep collecting and to found a large collection of plants for the Botanical Society in Edinburgh, Greville found leisure to occupy himself with insects , mollusks, and marine crabs, and to build large collections of them, albeit botany his main area remained. In Edinburgh he used to give popular lectures on botany. From 1829 to 1831 he published Icones Filicum together with William Hooker in two volumes, which also contain 240 colored illustrations drawn by him. The ferns depicted in it were sent to him mainly by Nathaniel Wallich (to whom he dedicated the work) and Wight from India , and by Lansdown Guilding from the West Indies and others. In 1830 Greville also published his important work on English algae in Edinburgh under the title Algae Britannicae: a Description of the Marine and other Inarticulated Plants of the British Islands, belonging to the order Algae, with Plates illustrative of the Genera .

In 1834 Greville toured Sutherlandshire with Selby and Jardine . Three years later he went on a major excursion with Graham, who was then a professor of botany in Edinburgh, to Braemar in the Grampian Mountains , a Scottish mountain range in Aberdeenshire . From this excursion he brought back over 15,000 beautifully inlaid specimens from the Alpine region and donated them to the aforementioned collection of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh.

It could not be missing that many societies, institutes and academies soon appointed this man, who was so active in the promotion of botany, their real, corresponding or honorary member. He was elected Honorary Secretary of the Edinburgh Botanical Society and President in the last year of his life. Otherwise he held no office, in particular did not hold a chair, although as a competent teacher he would have been suitable and longed for it in his youth. However, his modesty did not allow him to be a candidate for a vacant professorship and since he was in solid financial circumstances, he did not need to apply.

In the last years of his life, however, Greville's financial situation worsened when he suffered many pecuniary losses and was forced to make money with pen and brush. As an excellent landscape painter , he soon acquired an important reputation, mainly depicting scenes from the Highlands . Many of his paintings have appeared in exhibitions organized by the Scottish Academy. Connected to this is his last work, Plant Scenery of the World , begun in the 1850s with John Hutton Balfour , Professor of Botany at the University of Edinburgh . He intended to do the plant geography a service and to illustrate the flora areas with their characteristic groups and plants in pictorial representations. However, he gave up on this project due to the lack of competent lithographers.

In 1862 Greville was awarded the Neill Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh primarily for his essays on diatoms . His large collections of this group of algae were bought for the British Museum and his insect collection for the University of Edinburgh; his flowering plants were acquired by Balfour and his remaining cryptogams went to the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens . The latter collection, together with that of Professor Balfour, comprised around 50,000 species and of these around ten times as many individual specimens. It formed the core of the Edinburgh University herbarium .

Greville, who, among other things, had actively campaigned against slavery and was Vice-President of the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840 , contracted pneumonia on May 27, 1866 after falling asleep on wet grass. He died the following June 4th in his mansion in Murrayfield, Edinburgh, and was buried in Dean Cemetery there. A son and three daughters survived him.

Honor taxon

The genus Kayea Wall was named in his honor . named from the plant family of the Clusiaceae .

Works

Flora edinensis , 1824
Tentamen methodi muscorum; or, a new arrangement of the genera of mosses , together with George Arnott Walker Arnott , 1822–1826
Scottish cryptogamic flora , 1822-1828
Algae britannicae , 1830
The Amethyst , a Christian annual magazine published by Greville 1832-34 with Richard Huie
Facts illustrative of the drunkenness of Scotland with observations on the responsibility of the clergy, magistrates, and other influential bodies , 1834

swell

Robert Zander : Zander concise dictionary of plant names . Ed .: Fritz Encke , Günther Buchheim, Siegmund Seybold . 13th, revised and expanded edition. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-8001-5042-5 .

Individual evidence

^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed December 12, 2019 .
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Christian August Friedrich Garcke : Greville (Robert Kaye) . In: Johann Samuelansch , Johann Gottfried Gruber (ed.): General Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts , 1st section, vol. 90 (1871), p. 360 f.
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h George Simonds Boulger : Greville, Robert Kaye , in: Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), Vol. 23 (1890), pp. 164–166.
↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]

Web links

Commons : Robert Kaye Greville - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Literature by and about Robert Kaye Greville in the catalog of the German National Library
Author entry and list of the described plant names for Robert Kaye Greville at the IPNI

personal data
SURNAME	Greville, Robert Kaye
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British botanist
DATE OF BIRTH	December 13, 1794
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bishop Auckland , Durham
DATE OF DEATH	June 4, 1866
Place of death	Murrayfield

[1] Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed December 12, 2019 .

[Garcke-2] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Christian August Friedrich Garcke : Greville (Robert Kaye) . In: Johann Samuelansch , Johann Gottfried Gruber (ed.): General Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts , 1st section, vol. 90 (1871), p. 360 f.

[Boulger-3] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h George Simonds Boulger : Greville, Robert Kaye , in: Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), Vol. 23 (1890), pp. 164–166.

[Burkhardt2018-4] Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]