Genus Smithia

For Edward Smith (1759–1828), British botanist and physician who, in 1784, after Linnaeus’s (1707–1778) death purchased the latter’s entire collection of books, manuscripts and specimens for 900 guineas. He founded the Linnaean Society of London (1788) with Samuel Goodenough (1743–1827) and Thomas Marsham (1748–1819), and was its life president. In his last 30 years, he devoted himself to natural history and wrote, inter alia, Flora Britannica and The English Flora (four volumes), 3 348 botanical articles for Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1808–1819), the earliest US book on Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia (1791), and made substantial contributions to Flora Graeca. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1786) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1792).