| Note* | | Daniel Chambers MacReight He was born in County Armagh in 1799 (his name would have been pronounced ma - cray and is sometimes spelled McCreight). He studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin, BA 1820 MD 1827, and was a lecturer at Middlesex Hospital in London. He published Manual of British botany in 1837 - a signed presentation copy is in the library of The Linnean Society of London of which he was elected a fellow on 15 January 1833 (he withdrew from fellowship in 1841). Macreight was a founder of the Botanical Society of London in 1836. He went to Australia (1840), but returned to Channel Islands (Jersey); he is known to have collected plants in Ireland and Pyrenees, and in 1830 was in Geneva and went botanising with Alphonse de Candolle. Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle named the genus Macreightia after him - it belongs to the mainly tropical family Ebenaceae (ebonies) but was long ago sunk into Maba (and since then into Diospyros, persimmons). He married Caroline Paxton on 8 August 1829 at Upton Grey, Hampshire (she presumably was Marianne Adelaide's mother). No records of other children but they could well exist somewhere. I don't know why he went to Australia - he evidently did not do any botany there as databases of Australian botanists don't include him - nor do I know why he came back and settled in Jersey. He died there on 10 December 1857 (although another source says 1868). He is listed in Desmond & Ellwood, Dictionary of British and Irish botanists (1994), and is mentioned in Allen, The botanists (1986), and Kent's Historical flora of Middlesex (1975). His herbarium specimens are in several institutes include NBG Glasnevin (Dublin). |
Daniel Chambers MacReight