William Griffith
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| William Griffith | |
|---|---|
 Griffith 4686, cannabis from East Bengal in Griffith's herbarium, distributed from Kew in 1863–64 and held by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center (CC0)
| |
| Born | 4 March 1810 Ham Common, Surrey, England |
| Died | 9 February 1845 Malacca |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Surgeon and botanist |
| Institutions | East India Company; Calcutta Botanic Garden |
| Known for | Plant collections from Assam, Burma, Bhutan and Afghanistan, 1835–1841 |
| Collector name on accessions | W. Griffith |
| Botanical author abbreviation | Griff. |
William Griffith (4 March 1810 – 9 February 1845) was a British surgeon and botanist in the service of the East India Company. Between 1835 and 1841 he collected plants in Assam, Burma, Bhutan and Afghanistan. From 1842 to 1844 he had charge of the Company's botanic garden at Calcutta.[1] He crossed Bhutan with a British mission in 1838 and was the first botanist to visit the country.[2] In his journal of the mission he wrote that hemp grew near most villages but that he never saw enough of it to suppose it was used.[3] His travel journals also note Cannabis sativa in Bengal, the Khasi Hills and Afghanistan.[4][5] A cannabis sheet from his herbarium, labelled East Bengal, is held by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Kew distributed it in 1863–64, eighteen years after his death.[6]
His standard label name is W. Griffith. His botanical author abbreviation is Griff.[7][8]
Training in London
Griffith was the youngest son of Thomas Griffith. He was born at his father's house on Ham Common, near Kingston upon Thames in Surrey, on 4 March 1810.[1][10] His father was a London merchant. Griffith was apprenticed to a surgeon in the West End of London and from about 1829 attended classes at the new University College.[9] There he studied botany under John Lindley.[1] He also studied medical botany at the Apothecaries' Garden in Chelsea, where he won the Linnean gold medal of the Society of Apothecaries. He often visited Kew and admired the botanical artist Franz Bauer.[9]
His first published work appeared in 1832. The third volume of Nathaniel Wallich's Plantae Asiaticae Rariores carried his microscopic drawing of the wood of Phytocrene gigantea and his analysis of its flower. His note on the liverwort Targionia hypophylla was appended to Mirbel's study of Marchantia polymorpha in the same year.[1][9] John McClelland, who edited his papers after his death, added that Griffith was a great-grandson of the painter Jeremiah Meyer, one of the founders of the Royal Academy.[1]
Tenasserim and Assam
Griffith sailed for India in May 1832. He reached Madras on 24 September and was appointed an assistant surgeon in the Company's service on the Madras establishment.[1][10][9] After some months near Madras he was posted for more than two years to Mergui and collected widely in Tenasserim.[9]
In 1835 he was transferred to the Bengal presidency and joined a deputation sent to inspect the wild tea of Assam. Wallich and Griffith went as its botanists and John McClelland as its geologist.[1] Griffith's report on the tea plant of Upper Assam was published in Calcutta by the Agricultural Society.[1] Lang credits the report with the conclusion that tea could be grown in Assam and similar districts of India. Griffith reached it largely by comparing the flora of Assam with that of the tea districts of China.[9]
When the others went back, Griffith stayed in Assam for the whole of 1836.[9] Under Captain Jenkins, the Commissioner, he travelled to the eastern limit of the Company's territory and in late 1836 went into the Mishmi Hills.[1][9] In February 1837 he set out from Assam through the Burmese territories to Ava, by way of the Hukawng valley and went down the Irrawaddy to Rangoon. The government believed he had been murdered on the way. Newspapers reported his death. He reappeared in Calcutta in June.[1][9]
Bhutan
A fever followed the Burmese journey. On his recovery Griffith was made surgeon to the embassy that the Company was sending to Bhutan under Captain R. Boileau Pemberton.[1] The mission was to settle frontier disputes between Bhutan and British India.[2] Before it set out Griffith collected again in the Khasi Hills. He joined Pemberton at Goalpara.[1]
The party entered Bhutan in January 1838 and reached Dewangiri. It went north to Tashigang, then west by Tongsa to Punakha and left the country at Buxa in May.[2] The journey lasted four and a half months. Griffith collected about 1,200 specimens of vascular plants, many of them new to science. Species described from them include the conifers Abies densa and Larix griffithiana. He also gathered eight rhododendrons that were described only later, by Joseph Dalton Hooker from Sikkim.[2] His journal of the mission appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1839.[3] D. G. Long reconstructed the route in 1979 from Griffith's posthumous books and mapped his collecting localities.[2]
Afghanistan
In November 1838 Griffith joined the Army of the Indus and marched with it into Afghanistan.[9] His letters were written from Ludhiana in December 1838, from Kandahar in May 1839 and from Ghazni in July. In August 1839 he wrote from Kabul. In September he crossed ridges of 11,000 to 13,000 feet to Bamian and back.[1]
At Peshawar in December 1839 he obtained leave to stay another season in Afghanistan. He joined an expedition from Jalalabad into the Kunar valley. On the march in January 1840 his headman, Abdool Rozak, was wounded in an ambush and lost fingers of his right hand. In February 1840 he was on the frontier of Kafiristan, where he hoped to go further, but unrest in Bajaur stopped him. Fever kept him in bed for six weeks. In July 1840 he went to Kabul to recover.[1] He estimated his Afghan collection at about 1,500 species, with many duplicates.[1] He was back in Calcutta in August 1841, after visiting Simla and the Narmada.[1][10]
Malacca and the Calcutta garden
Griffith was next posted to Malacca as civil assistant surgeon. He stayed about a year, collected the plants of the province and visited Mount Ophir.[9] In August 1842 he was recalled to take charge of the botanic garden near Calcutta while Wallich was at the Cape of Good Hope for his health. He also taught botany at the Calcutta Medical College. He held the garden until Wallich returned in 1844.[1][9] From Calcutta he kept a plant collector at Malacca, Emanuel Fernandez. He wrote to him in 1843 and 1844 with instructions for sending palms, seeds and living plants in glazed cases.[1]
Collections and writing
Griffith collected for a general flora of India, which he did not live to write.[1][10] He estimated his collections, excluding Afghanistan, at 2,500 species from the Khasi Hills, 2,000 from Tenasserim, 1,000 from Assam, 1,200 from the Mishmi country, 1,700 from Bhutan, 1,000 from around Calcutta and 1,200 from the Naga Hills and the route to Ava. Many species occur in more than one of these sets.[1] In all he reckoned his plants at more than twelve thousand species. His journals note the plants met with on each march. He often sketched each day's route with the plants along it.[9]
His main papers were published in the Transactions of the Linnean Society, on the ovules of Santalum, Loranthus and Viscum. In the Calcutta Journal of Natural History, which he edited with McClelland, he published a long memoir on Azolla and Salvinia and an unfinished monograph of the palms of British India.[1] Lang credits him with an accurate account of the pollen chamber in the ovule of Cycas and of the pollen grains that enter it.[9] The Dictionary of National Biography reports that the leading authority on Indian botany of its day thought Griffith the most acute botanist ever to have worked in India. It adds that his temper led him into constant quarrels with his fellow officials.[10]
Cannabis in his journals
Griffith's itinerary notes for the journey of 1837 from Calcutta towards the Khasi Hills list Cannabis sativa on 11 September, among plants by the Paddo Nullah in Bengal.[4] In the Khasi Hills he saw hemp grown with sugarcane and mustard among the bamboos round the houses of a village whose language he took to be Bengali. Between Nungtung and Onkreem he listed cannabis among the plants of old clearings.[5]
In Bhutan his plant journal lists cannabis at Sassee, among rice fields at Ghoomkurrah and in cultivated places near Oongar.[11] His published journal of the mission says that at Sasee, a ruined village, the little cultivation consisted of barley, buckwheat and hemp. Summing up the country, he wrote:[3]
A few straggling plants of hemp are to be met with amongst most villages at rather low elevations, but I never saw any to an extent sufficient to warrant me in supposing that any use was made of it.
In Afghanistan, on the march from Kabul to Jalalabad, he found cannabis in the gardens at Gundamuck, beside cypresses, planes and mulberry trees. On the road from Peshawar to Lahore he listed it again near Hasan Abdal, where he noted that few Afghan plants remained and the vegetation had become mostly Indian.[5]
Cannabis specimens
Griffith's specimens are held at Kew, the British Museum, the Calcutta herbarium and several other herbaria. Their labels give little information. His plants carry three different sets of numbers.[2] The sheet at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Griffith 4686 (by 1845), is catalogued as U.1198641. Its printed label is headed Herbarium of the late East India Company and carries the number 4686, the locality East Bengal and the attribution Herb. Griffith. Its last line reads Distributed at the Royal Gardens, Kew. 1863-4. The label gives no collection date.[6] GBIF dates the specimen to 1863, the year of the Kew distribution.[12] The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris holds a sheet of the same number from East Bengal, catalogued under W. Griffith. Its catalogue entry notes that Kew gave it in 1863.[13]
Accessions collected by Griffith:
| Collected | Locality | Repository | Catalogue number | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Griffith 4686 (by 1845) | East Bengal | Naturalis Biodiversity Center | U.1198641 |
Death and posthumous works
In September 1844 Griffith married Miss Henderson, the sister of his brother Captain Griffith's wife. Wallich had resumed charge of the garden towards the end of the year. Griffith left Calcutta for Malacca on 11 December and arrived there on 9 January 1845. On 31 January he fell ill with hepatitis. He died at Malacca on 9 February 1845.[1][10]
He left his collections and manuscripts to the East India Company. McClelland arranged them for publication at Calcutta as Journals of Travels (1847), Itinerary Notes (1848), Icones Plantarum Asiaticarum (1847–1851), Palms of British East India (1850) and Notulae ad Plantas Asiaticas (1851).[10][1] The Dictionary of National Biography found the volumes badly edited and full of errors. It placed the original manuscripts in the library of the Kew herbarium, with a good set of his plants.[10] Lang opened his 1913 lecture on Griffith by recording that botanists had asked him "But who was Griffith?" He noted that Wilhelm Hofmeister had analysed Griffith's work on Loranthus and Viscum in 1859 and found it accurate.[9]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 Griffith, William (1847). "Notice of William Griffith". In McClelland, John (ed.). Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bootan, Affghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries. Calcutta: Bishop's College Press. pp. i–xxxii – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Long, D. G. (1979). "The Bhutanese itineraries of William Griffith and R. E. Cooper". Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. 37 (2): 355–368. doi:10.24823/nrbge.1979.3160.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Griffith, William (1839). "Journal of the Mission which visited Bootan, in 1837-38". Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 8. pp. 213, 280 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Griffith, William (1848). McClelland, John (ed.). Itinerary Notes of Plants Collected in the Khasyah and Bootan Mountains, 1837–38, in Affghanisthan and Neighbouring Countries, 1839 to 1841. Posthumous Papers. Vol. 2. Calcutta: J. F. Bellamy. p. 11 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Griffith, William (1847). McClelland, John (ed.). Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bootan, Affghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries. Calcutta: Bishop's College Press. pp. 178, 187, 416, 493 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Digitised sheet U.1198641: Cannabis sativa". Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ "Griffith, William". Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria. Botanist ID 684. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Griffith, William (1810–1845)". International Plant Names Index. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Harvard University Herbaria; Australian National Herbarium. Author ID 3387-1. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.00 9.01 9.02 9.03 9.04 9.05 9.06 9.07 9.08 9.09 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 Lang, William Henry (1913). "William Griffith, 1810–1845". In Oliver, Francis Wall (ed.). Makers of British Botany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 178–191 – via Wikisource.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 Jackson, Benjamin Daydon (1890). "Griffith, William (1810–1845)". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 23. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 240–241 – via Wikisource.
- ↑ Griffith, William (1847). McClelland, John (ed.). Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bootan, Affghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries. Calcutta: Bishop's College Press. pp. 214, 231, 255 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "Occurrence 2516987852: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 731718307: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 8 October 2026.