Thomas Thomson (4 December 1817 – 18 April 1878) was a British surgeon with the British East India Company before becoming a botanist. He was a friend of Joseph Dalton Hooker and helped write the first volume of Flora Indica. With Hooker he distributed the exsiccata-like series Herbarium Indiae orientalis. [1]
He was born in Glasgow the son of Thomas Thomson, chemistry professor at Glasgow University. He qualified as an M.D. at Glasgow University in 1839, as was appointed Assistant Surgeon in the Bengal Army 21 December 1839.
He served during the campaign in Afghanistan 1839-1842 being present at the capture of Ghazni in 1839 and was taken prisoner at Ghazni in March 1842 but was released 21 September 1842. He served in the Sutlej campaign, 1845–46, being present at Firuzshahr, and in the second Sikh war, 1848–49.
During 1847–48, Thomson served on the Kashmir Boundary Commission under the leadership of Alexander Cunningham. (Henry Strachey was the other commissioner.) Thomson explored the northern frontier of Kashmir, along the Karakoram Range. [2]
He was promoted Surgeon on 1 December 1853 and Surgeon Major on 21 December 1859.
He became Superintendent of the Honourable East India Company's Botanic Garden at Calcutta and was the Naturalist to and Member of the Tibet Mission. He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1855 and retired 25 September 1863. In 1866 he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal. [3]

Elias Magnus Fries was a Swedish mycologist and botanist. He is sometimes called the "Linnaeus of Mycology". In his works he described and assigned botanical names to hundreds of fungus and lichen species, many of which remain authoritative today.
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was a German botanist and explorer. Between 1817 and 1820, he travelled 10,000 km through Brazil while collecting botanical specimens. His most important work was a comprehensive flora of Brazil, Flora Brasiliensis, which he initiated in 1840 and was completed posthumously in 1906.
Miles Joseph Berkeley was an English cryptogamist and clergyman, and one of the founders of the science of plant pathology. The standard author abbreviation Berk. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Ferdinand Albin Pax was a German botanist specializing in spermatophytes. A collaborator of Adolf Engler, he wrote several monographs and described several species of plants and animals from Silesia and the Carpathians. He was a professor at Wrocław University from 1893. His son Ferdinand Albert Pax (1885–1964) was a noted zoologist.
Johann Friedrich Klotzsch was a German pharmacist and botanist.
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.
Christian Friedrich Ecklon was a Danish botanical collector and apothecary. Ecklon is especially known for being an avid collector and researcher of plants in South Africa.

Dr. Robert Kaye Greville FRSE FLS LLD was an English mycologist, bryologist, and botanist. He was an accomplished artist and illustrator of natural history. In addition to art and science he was interested in causes like abolitionism, capital punishment, keeping Sunday special and the temperance movement. He has a mountain in Queensland named after him.
Philipp Wilhelm Wirtgen was a German botanist and teacher born in Neuwied, Germany. He was the father of botanist Ferdinand Paul Wirtgen (1848–1924).
Friedrich Wilhelm Schultz was a German pharmacist and botanist who was a native of Zweibrücken.
Heinrich Christian Funck was a German pharmacist and bryologist. He was a co-founder of the Regensburg Botanical Society.

Georg Hans Emmo Wolfgang Hieronymus (1846–1921) was a European botanist of German extraction. He was born in Silesia and died in Berlin.
Felix Karl Albert Ernst Joachim Freiherr von Thümen was a German botanist and mycologist.
Charles Bagge Plowright was a British medical doctor and mycologist.
Boris Konstantinovich Schischkin was a Russian botanist and from 1943 corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. His name was Russian: Борис Константинович Шишкин, with his surname sometimes transliterated as Shishkin.
Gustav Wilhelm Körber was a German lichenologist.
David Nathaniel Friedrich Dietrich was German botanist and gardener.
Exsiccata is a work with "published, uniform, numbered set[s] of preserved specimens distributed with printed labels". Typically, exsiccatae refer to numbered collections of dried herbarium specimens or preserved biological samples published in several duplicate sets with a common theme or title, such as Lichenes Helvetici. Exsiccatae are regarded as scientific contributions of the editor(s) with characteristics from the library world and features from the herbarium world. Exsiccatae works represent a special method of scholarly communication. The text in the printed matters/published booklets is basically a list of labels (schedae) with information on each single numbered exsiccatal unit. Extensions of the concept occur.
IndExs – Index of Exsiccatae is an online biological database that plays a pivotal role in documenting more than 2,200 historical and ongoing series of exsiccatae and exsiccata-like works. Managed by the Botanische Staatssammlung München in München, IndExs serves as a comprehensive data repository for these series, providing detailed titles with information on the more than 1,300 editors, bibliographic information, exsiccatal numbers, publication timespans, ranges, information on preceding and superseding series and publishers. Exsiccatae, organised series of biological specimens distributed among biological collections, are essential resources found in major herbaria worldwide. Open access to the general information on exsiccatae facilitates global scientific engagement and research.