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Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Anderson, Alexander (d.1811)

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616042Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 01 — Anderson, Alexander (d.1811)1885James Britten

ANDERSON, ALEXANDER (d. 1811), botanist, was appointed in 1785 superintendent of the government botanic garden at St. Vincent, where he showed much activity. He was a correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks, through whom he contributed to the Royal Society in 1789 an account of a bituminous lake in St. Vincent, which was afterwards published in the Philosophical Transactions for that year. In 1791 he went into Guiana on a botanising expedition; the plants he obtained being sent to Banks, are now in the herbarium of the British Museum. The Society of Arts voted him a silver medal in 1798 for a paper upon the plants in the garden at St. Vincent. He contemplated the production of a flora of the Caribee islands, some sheets of which he sent to Banks; but this project was never carried out. He resigned his post in July 1811, and died on 8 Sept. in the same year.

[Loudon's Gardener's Mag. i. 194 (1826); Banks, Correspondence (MS.), 3 May 1789, and 30 March 1796.]

J. B.