BENTHAM , GEORGE

Bentham, son of the naval architect Samuel Bentham, was born in the southwestern English county of Devon; he first became interested in botany at the age of 17, while living in France with his parents. There he read Augustin Pyrame de Candolle's revision of J.B. Lamarck's Flore Française and was much impressed with its analytical keys for plant identification. Thus began his consuming interest in plant taxonomy, on which he consistently worked during his leisure time.

From 1826 to 1832 he was secretary to his uncle, the famous jurist and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, and studied for the bar at Lincoln's Inn. However, in 1833 he abandoned law for his growing botanical collection and library, which he generously presented to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in 1854. He then worked at Kew for the rest of his life.

His first botanical work, Catalogue des plantes indigènes des Pyrénées et du bas Languedoc (Catalog of the Indigenous Plants of the Pyrenees and lower Languedoc), was published in Paris in November, 1826. On his return to England he published Outlines of a New System of Logic (1827). Then beginning in the early 1830s, Bentham turned his attention more to botany and his first important work in this field, Labiatarum Genera et Species, appeared between 1832 and 1836. While at Kew he published his popular Handbook of the British Flora (1858) and contributed to the Kew series of colonial floras with his Flora Hongkongensis(1861) and the seven-volume Flora Australiensis (1863–78). In collaboration with Joseph Hooker he produced his greatest work, the Genera Plantarum (1862–83), which remains a standard in plant classification.