CURTIS, William

Well known botanist and author of a number of important publications on this subject, in particular the Flora Londiensis, from 1777, and the Botanical Magazine from 1781. He was not related to John Curtis (see above). Born in Alton, Hampshire, the son of a tanner. Apprenticed at the age of fourteen to his grandfather, an apothecary. At the age of twenty moved to London to complete his medical education. Quickly associated himself with a Mr Talwin, licentiate of the Apothecaries Company, to whose practice he eventually succeeded. Died in Brompton, London, after a long period of heart trouble, and is buried in Battersea. Although Curtis's interest in botany, which appears to have been stimulated by the study of herbals, showed itself when he was still a young man, his first publications were on entomological subjects. Instructions for Collecting and Preserving Insects, containing 44 pages, appeared in 1771, and Fundamenta Entomologiae being a translation of Linnaeus, in 1772. His single work devoted to Coleoptera, 'Some observations on the Natural History of Curculio Lapathi and Silpha griesa', appeared in rthe first volume of the Trans of the Linnaean Society (1791, 86-89) of which he was one of the founder Fellows. This seems to have been directly stimulated by his experience of these insects in his botanical work and in particular at the gardens he established at Bermondsey, Lambeth Marsh and Brompton. Curtis's insect collections passed to A.H.Haworth (see the Preface to the latter's Lepidoptera Britannica, 1803, xviii). Some of the material he collected for a projected work on the natural history of the British Isles, including drawings of insects chiefly by Moses Harris which were intended to illustrate the work, are in the Museum devoted to Curtis at Alton. There are a number of separate biographies including R.J.Thornton, Sketch of the Life and Writings of the Late Mr William Curtis, 1805, and William H. Curtis, William Curtis, 1941; and numerous accounts of Curtis in botanical, historical and other reference books; see in particular J.E.Lousley, William Curtis, 1746-1799, London Naturalist reprint, 37, 1946. (MD 4/02)