Talk:Robert Wight
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Year on the Edinburgh sheet
The handwritten slip on E00248604 gives a month in October and a year whose third digit is unclear at the resolution of the published image. Edinburgh's record, as published by GBIF (occurrence 575031386), reads October 1811. The accession page Wight s.n. (1821) reads October 1821. Wight was appointed in 1819 and reached India that year, so an 1811 date cannot be his own gathering. If the year is 1811, the material came into his herbarium from someone else. Both readings are reported in the article and neither is preferred. A higher-resolution image of the slip would settle it. The sheet's printed label Herb. Wight. propr. marks his own herbarium and does not name a collector.
Sources compared
Cleghorn (1873) and the Dictionary of National Biography (1900) agree on birth, appointment, the Madras post, Negapatam, the furlough, Coimbatore, retirement and marriage. The DNB entry gives the death date (26 May 1872), which the obituary pages used here do not repeat. The DNB says Wight's schoolfellows were fellow students at the High School and the university. Cleghorn names only the High School. The article follows Cleghorn.
The DNB says Wight was made a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1832. Cleghorn's list of societies records him as a vice-president of the Linnean Society without a date. Neither statement is used in the article.
Cannabis in his writings
No passage on cannabis by Wight has been found in the sources read: the obituary, the DNB entry, Edinburgh's introduction to his drawings, the Wallich list and the Harvard and IPNI records. Not yet examined: the Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis and its 1857 index, the Illustrations of Indian Botany, the Madras Journal of Science papers, and the Pharmacopoeia of India. Wight sat on the committee that prepared the Pharmacopoeia, but nothing read so far ties him to its cannabis entry, and the article does not claim it.
Other specimens
The Naturalis sheet L.1592642 (Leiden, Herb. Wight, Kew distribution 1866–68, number 2679) has no accession page yet. The Kew sheet K001039636, lot 4665 E, is cited on Wallich 4665E (by 1832).
Portrait
The portrait in the section on the furlough is the lithograph by Allan & Ferguson after Daniel Macnee, published in the Journal of Botany in 1840 and taken from the public-domain copy on Wikimedia Commons (RobertWight.jpg). The Commons scan carries a modern caption below the engraved lines, giving his age as 36; it was cropped off, and the age is not used in the article. Cleghorn's obituary was also issued with a lithographic portrait, not compared here.