This formed a clear challenge to religious orthodoxy, prompting the historic Evolution Debate in Oxford, 1860. Is that a Darwin-like ape in the background? ©Peter Von ShollyĪccording to the Theory of Evolution organisms continue to evolve over time and, if this were true, all species that had ever lived could not have been minted once-and-for-all on a single day (Day Three of Creation for plants and Day Six for animals). Completing the triangle, Hooker was to marry Henslow’s daughter. Another of Darwin’s inner circle was Professor John Stevens Henslow who had been his tutor at Cambridge and became his life-long mentor, helping Darwin gain his place on HMS Beagle. JD Hooker was Charles Darwin’s closest friend and confidant. He married Turner’s daughter Maria, and their son – Joseph Dalton Hooker – succeeded his father as Director of Kew (1865-1885). Hooker became Director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew from 1840 to 1865. A young botanist born in Magdalen Street, Norwich – William Jackson Hooker – discovered a rare moss in a fir plantation in nearby Sprowston so Smith introduced him to Dawson Turner who was to employ Hooker’s excellent draughtsmanship to illustrate his Natural History of Fuci (brown seaweed). Turner studied non-flowering plants like algae, mosses, ferns and fungi that reproduce by spores instead of seeds. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM: 1951.235.267 However, in his foreword, Norwich-born Sir James Edward Smith makes it clear that this book was “composed under the auspices and advice of Benjamin Stillingfleet ”. Stillingfleet’s friend and neighbour in London, the apothecary William Hudson, was another early adopter of the Linnean system in Flora Anglica (1762). For example, the fine structure of Bellis perennis allows the observer to differentiate between the common daisy and all other daisies. The Linnean system was a hierarchical one in which organisms were divided between the Animal and Plant Kingdom and then filtered – according to similarities or differences in the structure of their sexual parts – through increasingly finer family groupings of class, order, genus, species, until the two names of genus and species were sufficient to identify any plant. Stillingfleet may have been the first in this country to use the classification system of the Swede, Carl Linnaeus. ‘Breaking up of the Blue Stocking Club’ by Rowlandson As a consequence, the literary group started in the 1750s by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and friends, became known as the Bluestocking Society – the word now a reminder of women who value a life of the mind (despite satirical attempts to undermine them). When attending a women’s literary discussion group in London it was said that Stillingfleet was too poor to wear the black silk stockings of formal dress so came instead in his everyday blue worsted stockings. Marsham shared this interest in botany and climate with his friend Benjamin Stillingfleet, born in Wood Norton, tutor to William Windham (1702-71) of Felbrigg Hall. By chance, this was where a favourite piece of Norwich stained glass (the subject of my first blog post ) is also situated, so we could both pay homage. Once, my wife – who planted trees for a living – made an excursion to the church in Stratton Strawless (gravelly soil, poor crops, no straw) to pay homage to Marsham who had presented papers to the Royal Society on the cultivation of trees in poor soils.
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