John Gillies, M.D., traveller and botanist, 1792-1834

Abstract

During the first half of the nineteenth century progress in botany lay very largely in the hands of the systematists, many of whom were received into the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Among them are to be found such widely celebrated names as Sir Joseph Banks, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker, John Lindley, A. B. Lambert and Alexander Macleay. To all of these John Gillies and his work were well known. Gillies also numbered among his friends and acquaintance such distinguished travellers as John Miers and Captain Basil Hall, the naturalist Robert Jameson and the physicist Sir David Brewster, all of whom became Fellows. To-day, while their memory lives on, Gillies himself is all but forgotten. 1 W. J. Hooker, Professor of Botany in Glasgow, who early befriended him, wrote that ‘ Dr. Gillies carried with him a degree of scientific knowledge and a philosophical spirit of inquiry, such as have fallen to the lot of few travellers ’. 2 Gillies was a young naval surgeon who went to South America at the age of twenty-eight on sick leave, in the hope of avoiding an early death from consumption ; he stayed there for eight years trying to undertake scientific inquiries despite wars, civil disturbances and ill-health. The six years of life remaining to him after his return to the British Isles were spent in ordering his extensive botanical collections and in distributing them among his friends who published accounts of them on his behalf. In this way his collections became scattered but the greater proportion of them are still to be seen in the herbaria of the British Museum (Natural History), Kew, Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Brno, Florence and New York. 3 For these reasons an account of his life and work needs no apology.