As it is the season to be poking around in rock pools and enjoying the sea shore, our Book of the Month is Landsborough’s A popular history of British sea-weeds; ‘popular’ because it was written not as a specialist work, but as a reference tool for the amateur enthusiasts, although the author expressed the hope that ‘it may not be quite devoid of interest to proficients in science’. The Victorians were very interested in natural history, and amongst women especially there developed a craze for seaweed hunting. They are said to have taken to the beaches with their buckets, gathering specimens to be pressed into scrapbooks. For some this was a hobby, but for others it offered the opportunity for scientific investigation, in a way that may not have been possible in more academic environments.

One such woman who took to beachcombing with particular enthusiasm was Amelia Griffiths, who has been called the Queen of Seaweed. After the death of her husband, Amelia moved to Torquay in the late 1820s. By this time, she was already in correspondence with several prominent experts and had developed a reputation as a specialist in the field. The seaweed ‘Griffithsia’ was named in her honour. With her companion Mary Wyatt, she continued to collect important specimens from the local beaches, publishing a work in 1833 relating to seaweed found on the coast near Torbay. Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum holds a number of her works in their collections.

We can see from the inscription on the title page that this particular copy of the book was a gift from the author to Mrs Griffiths. We can also see that she supplied him with many of the examples listed in the book, as she is acknowledged throughout. Another inscription tells us that the book was donated to the Devon and Exeter Institution by Miss Griffiths – presumably one of her daughters.

The charm of the work owes no small part to the artwork, created by Walter Fitch, who specialised in botanical illustration and was known for his skill in lithography. On each plate, ‘Fitch lith’ is written in the bottom left-hand corner. Fitch was well known for his contributions to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, for which he created nearly 3,000 drawings. Through his association with William Hooker, who became the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1841, he became the official illustrator of the vast majority of books published by the Gardens over the next 40 years. Staff at the DEI were evidently concerned with the appeal of Fitch’s plates, as each is stamped with ‘Devon and Exeter Institution’ to deter potential thieves who would think to razor them out of the book.

Landsborough, like Fitch, was born in Scotland. As well as being a keen naturalist, he was also a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. Alongside seaweed, he conducted studies into flowering plants, shells and fossils. Like Mrs Griffiths, he too had an algae named after him, ‘Ectocarpus Landsburgii’, following his assistance to pre-eminent botanist Dr William Harvey in the compilation of his work Phycologia Britannica. In A popular history, Landsborough describes this algae as not having ‘much beauty to recommend it, but it is a little curiosity’. He passed away in 1854, having enjoyed some success from his publication: a second edition was published in 1851, and a third edition three years after his death.

A large proportion of the Doctor’s correspondence consisted of the interchange and distribution of sea-weeds, zoophytes, and shells, specimens of which he sent broad and wide over the kingdom with no slack hand. How will his correspondents miss his familiar letters, inclosing the last-found alga.

– Obituary to Dr. Landsborough, Fife Herald, 21 September 1854