Richard Spruce

Richard Spruce 1864
taken upon his return from Brazil

Richard Spruce (10 September 1817 – 28 December 1893) was an English botanist. One of the great Victorian botanical explorers, Spruce spent approximately 15 years exploring the Amazon from the Andes to the mouth, and was one of the first Europeans to visit many of the places where he collected specimens.

The plants and objects collected by Spruce (mostly in Brazil) from 1849 to 1864 form an important botanical, historical and ethnological resource, and are currently being databased at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London and at Trinity College Dublin.

Spruce successfully cultivated bitter bark quinine, making the drug widely available for the first time. The Brazilian peoples were the discoverers of the bark's anti-malarial action.

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.

As 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, aged 16, he drew 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 aList 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 Henry Baines's Flora of Yorkshire, published in 1840

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.

In 1864 Spruce was awarded a PhD by the Academiae Germanicae Naturae Curiosum and in 1866 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

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..."

External links

• "SPRUCE, RICHARD". Dictionary of national biography,. vol. 53: pages 431-432. 1898. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); |volume= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Richard Spruce Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens

Further reading

• Pearson M. Richard Spruce: naturalist and explorer. Hudson History, Settle, Yorkshire 2004.
• Raby, Peter Bright Paradise ISBN 0 7011 4613 3
• Seaward M.R.D. and Fitzgerald S.M.D. (eds) Richard Spruce (1817-1893): botanist and explorer. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1996. [A goldmine of details about his life & work as a botanist, with details of archival sources and a bibliography of articles by and about Spruce]
• Wallace A.R. (ed) and Spruce R. Notes of a botanist on the Amazon and the Andes... during the years 1849-1864 by Richard Spruce PhD. 2 vols, cr8vo, Macmillan, London 1908. [the first part of the first volume contains all the text completed by Spruce before his death, and the rest is written by Wallace on the basis of Spruce's notes]