Mr. Spencer Le M. Moore

Abstract

MR. SPENCER LE MARCHANT MOORE, who died on Mar. 14 last at the age of eighty years, joined the staff of the Herbarium at the Royal Gardens, Kew, in 1872, on leaving University College, where he gained the gold medal for botany. Pew young men have had the opportunity of training in so brilliant a school of sys-tematists as Kew then offered. Joseph Hooker was director, Daniel Oliver was in charge of the herbarium with J. G. Baker as his second, and George Bentham was in daily attendance, cooperating with Hooker on the “Genera Plantarum”, the greatest classic of plant taxonomy. Moore, who was about twenty-one years of age, quickly got to work. Between 1875 and 1880 he contributed a number of papers to the Journal of Botany, partly in co-operation with J. G. Baker, on collections from North China, tropical Africa, and the Mascarene Islands, and on various genera of Orchids and Acanthaceas. In 1877 appeared, in the same Journal, the first of his “Alabastra diversa”, a series of descriptions and critical notes bearing on genera and species of flowering plants, which, except for a long break from 1880 to 1899, continued almost yearly up to 1929. From 1877 until 1879 he assisted Henry Trimen in the editorship of the Journal.