Robert Bentley (botanist)

Robert Bentley was born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire in 1821. While apprenticed to a pharmacist in Tunbridge Wells, he developed an interest in botany. He subsequently studied medicine at King's College London, and became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1847 and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in 1849. [1]

Bentley served as botany lecturer at the Medical School of the London Hospital, and in 1859 became Professor of Botany at King's College London. [1]

In 1874, Bentley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, and he served as joint editor of the British Pharmacopeia of 1885.[1]

Bentley died at his home in Warwick Road, Kensington, on 24 December 1893, and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery.[1]

Lesser galangal shown in a plate from Medicinal Plants (1880)

• A Manual of Botany: including the structure, functions, classification, properties, and uses of plants, etc. (1861), at Google Books
• Characters, Properties, and Uses of Eucalyptus (1874)
• Botany (1875, London)
• Medicinal Plants: being descriptions with original figures of the principal plants employed in medicine and an account of the characters, properties, and uses of their parts and products of medicinal value - written with Henry Trimen (1880, London, Churchill)
• The Student’s Guide to Structural, Morphological, and Physiological Botany (1883, London)
• A Text-book of Organic Materia Medica, comprising a description of the vegetable and animal drugs of the British Pharmacopoeia, with other non-official medicines, etc. (1887)
• Physiological botany: an abridgement of The students’ guide to structural, morphological, and physiological botany. Appleton & Comp. New York 1886 (Digitized).

Attribution

• Boulger, George Simonds (1901). "Bentley, Robert" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). Vol. 1. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 181–2.

• The Annual Register (1894, Longmans, Green, and Company, London, p. 212)