Richard Spruce

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Richard Spruce (September 10, 1817 - December 28, 1893) was an English botanist and explorer. One of the great Victorian botanical explorers, Spruce spent approximately 15 years exploring South America, and was one of the first Europeans to visit many of the places where he collected specimens. The plants and objects collected by Richard Spruce in the Amazon and Andes from 1849 to 1864 form an important botanical, historical and ethnological resource, and are currently being fully databased at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London. He successfully cultivated bitter bark quinine, making the drug widely available for the first time.

1 Early life
2 Career
3 Quotations
4 Reference
5 External Links
6 Further Reading

[edit] Early life

The son of a schoolmaster, Spruce was born near Ganthorpe,a small village near the park and mansion of Castle Howard,in Yorkshire. He lived for some years in Welburn, to the south, before going to South America. After his return, he passed the last 17 years of his life in nearby Coneysthorpe.

When a child Spruce "showed much aptitude for learning, and at an early age developed a great love of nature. Amongst his favourite amusements was the making of lists of plants, and he had also a great liking for astronomy."

In 1834, when 16 years old, he had drawn up a neatly written list of all the plants he had found around Ganthorpe- arranged alphabetically and containing 403 species, the gathering and naming must certainly have occupied some years. Three years later he had drawn up a "List of the Flora of the Malton District” and this contains 485 species of flowering plants. Several of Spruce's localities for the rarer plants are given in Baines's Flora of Yorkshire, published in 1840

[edit] Career

This early interest in botany led him to being sent on a collecting trip in the Pyrenees in 1845-6. In 1849 he followed Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates to the Amazon, collecting more than 30,000 plant specimens there and in the Andes during the next 14 years. After returning to England he wrote The Hepaticae of the Amazon and the Andes of Peru and Ecuador.

His paper on the Musci and Hepaticae of Teesdale, the result of a three weeks' excursion, showed him to be one of the most lynx-eyed discoverers of rare species, as well as an accurate discriminator of them. In Baines's Flora of Yorkshire (1840) only four mosses were recorded from Teesdale, though no doubt many more had been collected - Spruce raised the number to 167 mosses and 41 hepaticae, of which six mosses and one Jungermannia were new to Britain.

In April 1845 he published in the London Journal of Botany descriptions of 23 new British mosses, of which about half were discovered by himself and the remainder by other botanists. In the same year he published, in the Phytologist, his "List of the Musci and Hepaticae of Yorkshire," in which he recorded no less than 48 mosses new to the English Flora and 33 others new to that of Yorkshire.

The standard author abbreviation Spruce may be used to indicate this person in citing a botanical name.

[edit] Quotations

"...My delicate health and retiring disposition have combined with my love of botanical pursuits to render me fond of solitary study, and I must confess that I feel a sort of shrinking at the idea of engaging in the turmoil of active life..."