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Explorer and naturalist Thomas Thomson (1817 78) led an intrepid
life. He started his career as an assistant surgeon with the East
India Company and soon became a curator of the Asiatic Society's
museum in Bengal. He was sent to Afghanistan in 1840 during the
First Anglo-Afghan War, and was captured but managed to escape as
he was about to be sold as a slave. Undaunted by this misfortune,
he accepted a perilous mission to define the boundary between
Kashmir and Chinese Tibet in 1847. During his eighteen-month
journey, Thomson explored the Kashmir territories and went as far
north as the barren Karakoram Pass. He collected valuable
geographical and geological information as well as a wealth of
botanical specimens. He describes his findings in minute detail in
this account, first published in 1852. Thomson later became a
Fellow of the Linnean Society, the Royal Geographical Society and
the Royal Society.
Sir Joseph Hooker (1817 1911) was one of the greatest British
botanists and explorers of the nineteenth century. He succeeded his
father, Sir William Jackson Hooker, as Director of the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew, and was a close friend and supporter of
Charles Darwin. His journey to the Himalayas and India, during
which he collected some 7,000 species, was undertaken between 1847
and 1851 to increase the Kew collections; his account of the
expedition (also reissued in this series) was dedicated to Darwin.
In 1855 he published Flora Indica with his fellow-traveller Thomas
Thomson, who became Superintendent of the East India Company's
Botanic Garden at Calcutta. Lack of support from the Company meant
that only the first volume of a projected series was published.
However, the introductory essay on the geographical relations of
India's flora is considered to be one of Hooker's most important
statements on biogeographical issues.
The Royal Society has been dedicated to scientific inquiry since
the seventeenth century. In 1811, Thomas Thomson (1773-1852), a
pioneering chemistry teacher who was elected a fellow of the
society in the same year, undertook the project of writing a
history of the organisation's illustrious past. In this book,
published in 1812, Thomson explains how the group began in 1645,
initiated by men who met once a week to discuss natural philosophy
and mathematics. They were eventually granted a royal charter by
Charles II in 1662. The society grew in number and prestige, and
began publishing research in its Philosophical Transactions in
1665. Thomson's work focuses particularly on the development of the
group's many scientific areas of interest and summarises various
papers it published. He also includes a full list of the
fellowship, from the society's foundation to 1812, and a copy of
the society's original charter.
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