John Martyn (botanist)
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John Martyn or Joannis Martyn (September 12, 1699 - January 29, 1768) was an English botanist.
Martyn's is best known for his Historia Plantarum Rariorum (1728-1737), and his translation, with valuable agricultural and botanical notes, of the Eclogues (1749) and Georgics (1741) of Virgil. On resigning the botanical chair at Cambridge he presented the university with a number of his botanical specimens and books.
Martyn was born in London, the son of a merchant. He attended a school in the vicinity of his home, and when he turned 16, worked for his father, intending to follow a business career. He abandoned this idea in favour of medical and botanical studies. His interest in botany came from his acquaintance with an apothecary, John Wilmer, and Dr. Patrick Blair, a surgeon-apothecary from Dundee who practiced in London. Martyn gave some botanical lectures in London in 1721 and 1726, and in 1727 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
Martyn was one of the founders (with Johann Jacob Dillenius and others) and the secretary of a botanical society which met for a few years in the Rainbow Coffee-house, Watling Street; he also started the Grub Street Journal, a weekly satirical review, which lasted from 1730 to 1737.
In 1732 he was appointed professor of botany at Cambridge University, but, finding little encouragement and hampered by a lack of equipment, he soon ceased lecturing. He retained his professorship, however, till 1768, when he resigned in favour of his son Thomas (1735-1825), author of Flora rustica (1792-1794). Although he had not taken a medical degree, he long practised as a physician at Chelsea, where he died.
The standard botanical author abbreviation J.Martyn is applied to species he described.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
