The Principles of Descriptive and Physiological Botany

1836 ILLUSTRATED BIOLOGY OF PLANTS BY EMINENT SCOTTISH BOTANIST AND DARWIN'S MENTOR, WHO RECOMMENDED HIM TO JOIN THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE IN 1831. 7 inches tall hardcover, mauve cloth binding, paper label to spine, previous owner signature to front paste-down, dated 1861, viii, 322 pp, many wood engravings in text. Covers worn and stained, spine sunned with worn intact paper label, binding tight, text clean and unmarked, very good minus in custom archival mylar cover. JOHN STEVENS HENSLOW (1796 - 1861) was an English clergyman, botanist and geologist. He is best remembered as friend and mentor to his pupil Charles Darwin. In 1822 he was appointed Professor of Mineralogy in the University of Cambridge. Two years later he took holy orders. Botany, however, had claimed much of his attention, and to this science he became more and more attached, so that he gladly resigned the chair of Mineralogy in 1827, two years after becoming Professor of Botany. He was a correspondent of John James Audubon who in 1829 named Henslow's Sparrow after him. He followed the understanding of the time that species were fixed as created but could vary within limits, and hoped to analyze these limits of variation. By a method he called collation, Henslow prepared sheets with several plant specimens, each labelled with the collector, date and place of collection, comparing the specimens to show the variation within the species. His Catalogue of British Plants was first published in October 1829, and became a set book for his lecture course. Earlier that year, Charles Darwin joined the course and along with other students helped to collect plants of Cambridgeshire. In 1830 Henslow experimented on varying the conditions of garden grown wild plants to produce various forms of the plant. In 1835 Henslow published Principles of Descriptive and Physiological Botany (offered here) as a textbook based on this lecture course. In the summer of 1831 Henslow was offered a place as naturalist to sail aboard the survey ship HMS Beagle on a two-year voyage to survey South America, but his wife dissuaded him from accepting. Seeing a perfect opportunity for his protg, Henslow wrote to the ship's captain Robert Fitzroy telling him that Darwin was the ideal man to join the expedition team. During the voyage, Darwin corresponded with Henslow, and collected plants with him in mind. In particular, when first arriving at the Galpagos Islands Darwin noted I certainly recognize S America in Ornithology, would a botanist, and went on to collect plant specimens carefully labelled by island and date. He also labelled the mockingbirds he caught, and initially thought these were varieties but while arranging these bird specimens on the last lap of the voyage he began wondering if they could be species, a possibility which would undermine the stability of Species. Henslow's teaching continued to influence Darwin's work on evolution.

Product Info

Publisher: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman

Year: 1836

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

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