Robert Wight

Robert Wight ( born July 6, 1796 in Milton (East Lothian ), Scotland, † May 26 1872 in Reading, England) was a Scottish botanist and surgeon. Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Wight ".

Wight spent 30 years of his life in British India, and was among other things, the director of the Botanic Garden in Madras. His most famous works are the Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis ( Illustrations of the plants of the East Indies ), which appeared in 1856 in six volumes.

Biography

Robert Wight was born on July 6, 1796 in Milton, a hamlet near Pencaitland in East Lothian, as the twelfth of fourteen children, his father was a member of the Writers to the Signet, an association of Scottish Solicitoren. He attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh and later the University of Edinburgh, where he successfully completed his medical training in 1816.

After studying his work began as a ship's surgeon and he came to India for the first time in 1819. Since he was first assistant surgeon and surgeon of the 33rd Regiment of Native Infantry of the British East India Company. After three years, he was transferred to Madras because of his obvious interest in botany at the Botanical Gardens. From 1826 to 1828 he laid out an extensive botanical collection, which he sent to William Jackson Hooker to Glasgow. In 1828 he was again restored as a surgeon in a garrison after Nagapattinam.

In 1831 he fell ill and returned to Scotland for three years back, he brought over two tons of collected plant material, a total of 100,000 individual plants from 3000 to 4000 different species. These were examined by George Arnott Walker Arnott.

Wight published the Spicilegium Nilghiriense in two volumes with 200 color plates. Between 1840 and 1850 he was the Illustrations of Indian Botany out in two volumes, and finally with the Arnott Prodromus Florae peninsulae indicae. Wight was mainly due to large illustrations of Indian plants interested. For his main work, the Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis, he made the illustrations of two Indian artists called Rungiah and Govindoo make. Unlike the other British botanists of the time he wrote the works of local artists to also. He even named a genus of orchids that Govindooia, after Govindoo. The work was the first attempt to create a flora of India, even if the project was not completed.

Back in India Wight worked in Coimbatore on an experimental cotton farm. He was co-founder of the Madras Agri - Horticultural Society. In 1853 he finally returned to the UK; there he died in 1872 at his country house near Reading in England.

Ehrentaxa

In his honor, named Nathaniel Wallich 1830, the genus Wightia the plant family Scrophulariaceae.

There also several types of orchids are named after Wight, as wightianum Tower of the Winds, Doritis wightii and Saccolabium wightianum.