Alfred Gibbs Bourne | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 8 August 1859 |
| Died | 14 July 1940 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Zoology, Botany |
| Institutions | Presidency College, Madras Indian Institute of Science |
Sir Alfred Gibbs Bourne KCIE FRS FLS DSc [1] (8 August 1859, Lowestoft – 14 July 1940, Dartmouth, Devon) was an English zoologist, botanist and educator who worked in India.
Bourne was the son of Rev. Alfred Bourne, secretary of the British Foreign School Society, and he joined the University College School after a liberal home education. Along with his contemporary Sydney J. Hickson, he was fascinated by the lectures of Ray Lankester. He later joined the University College in 1876 and attended the Royal School of Mines. In 1886, he went to Madras to join the Presidency College as Professor of Biology. He held this position until 1898 although he also held the positions of Registrar and Superintendent of the Madras Government Museum.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1895. [1] [2]
In 1903 he was made Director of Public Instruction and he worked on changes in the secondary education system, being responsible for the introduction of the Secondary School Leaving Certificate System. After his retirement, he took charge as director of the Indian Institute of Science, holding this position from 1915 to 1921. He was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1913. [3]
He married Emily Tree Glaisher (or Glashier in some sources) in 1888. Lady Bourne (died 18 September 1954 [4] ) was an acclaimed botanical artist and she teamed up with other artists at Kodaikanal to produce illustrations of the local flora. These illustrations were used in The Flora of the Nilgiri and Pulney Hill-tops by Philip Furley Fyson. A daughter married Stephen Cox of the Indian Forest Service. [5]
Alfred William Alcock was a British physician, naturalist, and carcinologist.
Sir Dietrich Brandis was a German-British botanist and forestry academic and administrator, who worked with the British Imperial Forestry Service in colonial India for nearly 30 years. He joined the British civil service in Burma in 1856, shortly afterwards became head of the British forestry administration in all of Burma, and served as Inspector General of Forests in India from 1864 to 1883. He returned to Europe in 1883, dividing his time between Bonn and Greater London. In retirement he dedicated himself to scholarly work, resulting in the book Indian Trees (1906), his magnum opus. Brandis is considered the father of tropical forestry and has also been described as the father of scientific forestry. In addition to his work in India, he also had a significant influence on forest management in the United States.
William Roxburgh FRSE FRCPE FLS was a Scottish surgeon and botanist who worked extensively in India, describing species and working on economic botany. He is known as the founding father of Indian botany. He published numerous works on Indian botany, illustrated by careful drawings made by Indian artists and accompanied by taxonomic descriptions of many plant species. Apart from the numerous species that he named, many species were named in his honour by his collaborators.
Arthur Lawley, 6th Baron Wenlock, was a British colonial administrator who served variously as Administrator of Matabeleland, Governor of Western Australia, Lieutenant-Governor of the Transvaal, and Governor of Madras. The fourth and youngest son of the 2nd Baron Wenlock, he attended Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, before joining the military. Serving in the Mahdist War, he reached the rank of captain before resigning his commission to pursue other interests. Lawley was then private secretary to his uncle, the 1st Duke of Westminster, and subsequently to the 4th Earl Grey, who he followed to Rhodesia.
Sir Walter Elliot, KCSI was a British civil servant in colonial India. He was also an eminent orientalist, linguist, archaeologist, naturalist and ethnologist who worked mainly in the Presidency of Madras. Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the East India Company College at Haileybury and joined the East India Company's civil service at Madras in 1820 and worked on until 1860. He was invested Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India (KCSI) in 1866.
Robert Wight MD FRS FLS was a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company, whose professional career was spent entirely in southern India, where his greatest achievements were in botany – as an economic botanist and leading taxonomist in south India. He contributed to the introduction of American cotton. As a taxonomist he described 110 new genera and 1267 new species of flowering plants. He employed Indian botanical artists to illustrate many plants collected by himself and Indian collectors he trained. Some of these illustrations were published by William Hooker in Britain, but from 1838 he published a series of illustrated works in Madras including the uncoloured, six-volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand-coloured, two-volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51). By the time he retired from India in 1853 he had published 2464 illustrations of Indian plants. The standard author abbreviation Wight is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Edward Nye, was a senior British Army officer who served in both world wars. In the latter he served as Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff (VCIGS).
Sir Thomas Henry Holland was a British geologist who worked in India with the Geological Survey of India, serving as its director from 1903 to 1910. He later worked as an educational administrator at Edinburgh University.
Arthur Roy ClaphamCBE, FRS, was a British botanist. Born in Norwich and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, Clapham worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station as a crop physiologist (1928–30), and then took a teaching post in the botany department at Oxford University. He was Professor of Botany at Sheffield University 1944–69 and vice chancellor of the university during the 1960s. He coauthored the Flora of the British Isles, which was the first, and for several decades the only, comprehensive flora of the British Isles published in 1952 and followed by new editions in 1962 and 1987. In response to a request from Arthur Tansley, he coined the term ecosystem in the early 1930s.
General Geoffrey Kemp Bourne, Baron Bourne, was a British Army officer.
Bourne is an English surname. Notable people with the surname include:
James Sykes Gamble was an English botanist who specialized in the flora of the Indian sub-continent; he became Director of the British Imperial Forest School at Dehradun, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Philip Furley Fyson (1877–1947) was a botanist and educator who worked in India. He is noted as the author of the first illustrated volumes on the flora of the South Indian hills. The Fyson prize is instituted in his honour by the Presidency College, Chennai for work in the area of Natural science.
Hilda Mary Lazarus CBE, MStJ, MRCS, FRCSE was a Christian missionary and popular gynecologist and obstetrician in India. She was Principal of Andhra Medical College and Superintendent of King George Hospital at Visakhapatnam. She was also the first Indian director of Christian Medical College and Hospital at Vellore.
General Sir Alan Fleming Hartley, was a British Indian Army officer during the Second World War.
Sir Francis Joseph Edward Spring was an Anglo-Irish civil engineer and member of the Imperial Legislative Council who played a pioneering role in development of the Indian Railways. Spring is largely remembered today for championing the cause of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Sir George Stuart Forbes was an Indian civil servant who served as a member of the Executive Council of the Governor of Madras from 1906 to 1909.
Colonel Alfred Edward Webb-Johnson, 1st Baron Webb-Johnson, known as Sir Alfred Webb-Johnson, Bt, between 1945 and 1948, was a British surgeon.
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