| AdminHistory | Benjamin Daydon Jackson (1846-1927) was a botanist, taxonomer and fellow of the Linnean Society.
He was born to Benjamin Daydon Jackson (Sr.) and Elizabeth Gaze on 3 April 1846 in Southwark, Surrey and started his career in secretarial and accountancy work. His interest in botany, however, led to his involvement with Kew and the British Museum where he collected specimens for them. At the age of twenty-two he was elected into the Linnean Society in 1868 and became the Society's Botanical Secretary from 1880 to 1902, the General Secretary from 1902 to 1926 and the Curator of Linnean Collections in 1926. He was well known for his literature and works of reference on the subject of Botany including the 'Guide to the Literature of Botany,' 'Vegetable Technology: a Contribution towards a Bibliography of Economic Botany' and the 'Kew Index,' as well as being an authority on Carl Linnaeus. In 1907 he received an honorary Ph.D. and A.M. from Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Order of Knighthood of the Polar Star in recognition of his achievements. Jackson passed away on 12 October 1927 in Westminster Hospital due to injuries he suffered from being hit by a motor-car on Buckingham Palace Road.
The Index Kewensis was published by Jackson between 1893 and 1895. It was intended to be an index recording all the scientific names of flowering plants from the time of Carl Linnaeus to the year 1885 according to their species and genera. The project was directed by Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), a fellow botanist and director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and funded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who had expressed an interest in funding a project devoted to biological science before his death. The first version of the index contained 400,000 names, but further supplements were published to compensate for the addition of new plant names. |