Daniel Carlsson Solander or
Daniel Charles Solander (19 February 1733 – 16 May
1782) was a Swedish
botanist.
Solander
was born in Piteå
, Norrland, Sweden and was the son of a Lutheran
principal. He enrolled at Uppsala University
in July 1750 and studied languages and the
humanities. The professor of botany was the celebrated
Carolus Linnaeus who was soon
impressed by young Solander's ability and accordingly persuaded his
father to let him study natural history.
He traveled to
England
in 1760 to promote Linnaeus' new system of
classification. He was an assistant librarian at the British Museum
from 1763 onwards, and elected as Fellow of the
Royal Society in the following
year. Afterwards he held the position of Keeper of
Printed Books at the British Museum.
In 1768
Solander and his fellow scientist Dr. Herman Spöring were employed by
Joseph Banks, to join him on James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific Ocean
on board the Endeavour.They were the
botanists who inspired the name Botanist Bay (which later
became Botany
Bay
), Cook's expedition's first landing place in
Australia.Solander helped make
and describe an important collection of Australian plants while the
Endeavour was beached at the site of present-day Cooktown
for nearly 7 weeks, after being damaged on the
Great Barrier
Reef
. These collections later formed the basis of
Banks' Florilegium.
On their return in 1771 he became Banks' secretary and librarian
and lived in his house at Soho Square.
In 1772 he
accompanied Banks on his voyage to Iceland
, the Faroes
and the
Orkney
Islands
. Between 1773 and 1782 he was Keeper of the
Natural History Department of the British Museum. In 1773 he was
elected a foreign member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences.
Solander invented the book-form box known as the
Solander box which is still used in
libraries and archives as the most suitable way of storing prints,
drawings,
herbarium materials and some
manuscripts.
He died at Banks' home in Soho Square of a
stroke, aged 49, at 9.30pm on 13 May 1782. An autopsy
was performed the next day, and revealed a brain haemorrhage.
Solander Gardens in the east end of
London is named after him, as are the Solander Islands off New Zealand
's South Island. One of the many plants named
in his honour is
Nothofagus solandri. He was associated
with Banks in
Illustrations of the Botany of Captain Cook's
Voyage Round the World, and his
The Natural History of
Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes, Collected by the late John
Ellis, was published posthumously in 1786.
References
- [1]
- Duyker, Edward. 1998. Nature's Argonaut: Daniel Solander
1733-1782: Naturalist and Voyager with Cook and Banks.
Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0-522-84753-6
- Royal Society Archive entry on Solander
- Duyker, Edward & Tingbrand, Per (ed. & trans) 1995,
Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence 1753—1782, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 466, ISBN 0 522 84636 X
Scandinavian University Press, Oslo, 1995, pp. 466, ISBN 82 00
22454 6
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