Asa Gray is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century. His Darwiniana was considered an important explanation of how religion and science were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Gray was adamant that a genetic connection must exist between all members of a species. He was also strongly opposed to the ideas of hybridization within one generation and special creation in the sense of its not allowing for evolution. He was a strong supporter of Darwin, although Gray's theistic evolution was guided by a Creator.
Edward Tuckerman was an American botanist and professor who made significant contributions to the study of lichens and other alpine plants. He was a founding member of the Natural History Society of Boston and most of his career was spent at Amherst College. He did the majority of his collecting on the slopes of Mount Washington in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Tuckerman Ravine was named in his honor. The standard botanical author abbreviation Tuck. is applied to species he described.
Amos Eaton was an American botanist, geologist, and educator who is considered the founder of the modern scientific prospectus in education, which was a radical departure from the American liberal arts tradition of classics, theology, lecture, and recitation. Eaton co-founded the Rensselaer School in 1824 with Stephen van Rensselaer III "in the application of science to the common purposes of life". His books in the eighteenth century were among the first published for which a systematic treatment of the United States was attempted, and in a language that all could read. His teaching laboratory for botany in the 1820s was the first of its kind in the country. Eaton's popular lectures and writings inspired numerous thinkers, in particular women, whom he encouraged to attend his public talks on experimental philosophy. Emma Willard would found the Troy Female Seminary, and Mary Mason Lyon, the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Eaton held the rank of senior professor at Rensselaer until his death in 1842.
Charles Christopher Parry was a British-American botanist and mountaineer.
Isaac Sprague was a self-taught landscape, botanical, and ornithological painter. He was America's best known botanical illustrator of his day.
Torreya californica is a species of conifer endemic to California, occurring in the Pacific Coast Ranges and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It is commonly known as California torreya or California nutmeg tree.
Merritt Lyndon Fernald was an American botanist. He was a respected scholar of the taxonomy and phytogeography of the vascular plant flora of temperate eastern North America. During his career, Fernald published more than 850 scientific papers and wrote and edited the seventh and eighth editions of Gray's Manual of Botany. Fernald coauthored the book Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America in 1919–1920 with Alfred Kinsey, which was published in 1943.
Charles Theodor Mohr was a pharmacist and botanist of German descent who lived and worked in the United States.
Jane Colden was an American botanist, described as the "first botanist of her sex in her country" by Asa Gray in 1843. Although not acknowledged in contemporary botanical publications, she wrote a number of letters resulting in botanist John Ellis writing to Carl Linnaeus of her work applying the Linnaean system of plant identification to American flora, for which botanist Peter Collinson stated "she deserves to be celebrated". Contemporary scholarship maintains that she was the first female botanist working in America. She was regarded as a respected botanist by many prominent botanists including John Bartram, Peter Collinson, Alexander Garden, and Carl Linnaeus. Colden is most famous for her untitled manuscript, housed in the British Museum, in which she describes the flora of the Hudson Valley in the Newburgh region of New York state, including ink drawings of 340 different species.
William Starling Sullivant was an early American botanist recognized as the foremost authority on bryophytes in the United States.
William Darlington, was an American physician, botanist, and politician who served as a Democratic-Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Pennsylvania's 2nd congressional district from 1819 to 1823.
George Vasey was an English-born American botanist who collected a lot in Illinois before integrating the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he became Chief Botanist and curator of the greatly expanded National Herbarium.
Michael Schuck Bebb was an amateur systematic botanist in the 19th century with a reputation as the leading salicologist in both America and Europe. His extensive work on the genus Salix led to several plants being named in his honour.
Stephen Elliott was an American legislator, banker, educator, and botanist who is today remembered for having written one of the most important works in American botany, A Sketch of the Botany of South-Carolina and Georgia. The plant genus Elliottia is named after him.
William Baldwin was an American physician and botanist who is today remembered for his significant contributions to botanical studies, especially Cyperaceae. He lived in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Georgia, and served as a ship's surgeon on two voyages overseas. He published only two scientific papers, but his major contributions were in the knowledge that he imparted to other botanists in his letters to them and in the thousands of specimens that he provided for their herbaria. He wrote letters to Henry Muhlenberg, Stephen Elliott, William Darlington, Zaccheus Collins, and others. His most important collections were from Georgia, Florida, and eastern South America. When he died, he left a large herbarium that proved to be of great value, especially to Lewis David von Schweinitz, John Torrey, and Asa Gray. He had a special interest in the plant family Cyperaceae and his incomplete, unpublished manuscripts were a major source for monographs by John Torrey and Asa Gray. The historian Joseph Ewan has said that "Baldwin's treatment of a number of genera, especially in the Cyperaceae, showed penetrating observation, understanding, and diagnosis". The genus Balduina was named for him by Thomas Nuttall. Most of what we know of him is from the biography written by his friend, William Darlington, in 1843.
William Dunlop Brackenridge (1810–1893) was a British-American nurseryman and botanist.
This George Engelmann bibliography provides an overview of works written by the 19th century scientist George Engelmann. They appeared mostly in journals such as the London Journal of Botany, the Botanischen Zeitung, the Boston Journal of Natural History, the American Journal of Science and Arts, the Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, the American Naturalist, and the Botanical Gazette or the Gardeners' Chronicle.
Willard Webster Eggleston was an American botanist, employed by the United States Department of Agriculture Bureau of Plant Industry. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1891 with a Bachelor of Science degree. In his work on the taxonomy of Crataegus, now known to be complicated by apomixis, polyploidy, and hybridization, he aimed to simplify, counteracting the proliferation of species names that other botanists had produced.
John Milton Bigelow was an American physician and botanist. He had a successful medical practice, and also, a keen interest in botany - especially native plants with medical applications. He participated as a botanist and surgeon on two important expeditions through the American Southwest—the Mexican Boundary Survey and the 35th Parallel Expedition for the Pacific Railroad Surveys. He also amassed a significant collection of California plants that yielded many new species. He communicated his botanical results with the three top American botanists of the day, John Torrey, Asa Gray, and George Engelmann. Many of his botanical discoveries were named after or by him. He contributed to the botanical and medical literature of his day.
John Howard Redfield was an American botanist, conchologist, and businessman. He was a founder of the Botany section of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and his chief botanical works include "Geographical Distribution of the Ferns of North America" and Flora of Mount Desert Island, Maine.
