WALLER, Sir WILLIAM (d. 1699), informer, son of Sir William Waller (1597?–1668) [q. v.] by his second wife, Anne Finch, distinguished himself during the period of the popish plot by his activity as a Middlesex justice in catching priests, burning Roman catholic books and vestments, and getting up evidence. He was the discoverer of the meal-tub plot and one of the witnesses against Fitzharris (North, Examen, pp. 262, 277, 290; Luttrell, Diary, i. 7, 29, 69). In April 1680 the king put him out of the commission of the peace (ib. i. 39). Waller represented Westminster in the parliaments of 1679 and 1681. During the reaction which followed he fled to Amsterdam, of which city he was admitted a burgher (Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, ii. 452, 455). In 1683 and the following year he was at Bremen, of which place Lord Preston, the English ambassador at Paris, describes him as governor. Other political exiles gathered round him, and it became the nest of all the persons accused of the last conspiracy, i.e. the Rye House plot. ‘They style Waller, by way of commendation, a second Cromwell,’ adds Preston (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. pp. 296, 311, 347, 386). When the prince of Orange invaded England Waller accompanied him, and he was with the prince at Exeter (ib. pp. 417, 423; Reresby, Diary, p. 410). William, however, would give him no employment (Foxcroft, Life of Halifax, ii. 215, 224). He died in July 1699 (Luttrell, iv. 538).
Waller is satirised as ‘Industrious Arod’ in the second part of ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (ll. 534–55):
The labours of this midnight magistrate
Might vie with Corah's to preserve the State.
He is very often introduced in the ballads and caricatures of the exclusion bill and popish plot times (see Catalogue of Satirical Prints in the British Museum, i. 609, 643, 650; Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Ballad Society, iv. 155, 177, 181; Loyal Poems collected by Nat Thompson, 1685, p. 117). Waller was the author of an anti-catholic pamphlet, ‘The Tragical History of Jetzer,’ 1685, fol.
[Wood's Athenæ, iii. 817; other authorities mentioned in the article.]
WALLEYS. [See Wallensis.]
WALLICH, NATHANIEL (1786–1854), botanist, was by birth a Dane, and was born at Copenhagen on 28 Jan. 1786. Having graduated M.D. in his native city, where he studied under Vahl, he entered the Danish medical service when still very young, and in 1807 was surgeon to the Danish settlement at Serampore. When this place fell into the hands of the East India Company in 1813, Wallich, with other officers, was allowed to enter the English service. Though at first attached to the medical staff, on the resignation of Dr. Francis Hamilton in 1815 he was made superintendent of the Calcutta botanical garden. He at once distinguished himself by his great activity in collecting and describing new plants, causing them to be drawn, and distributing specimens to the chief English gardens and herbaria. In 1820 he began, in conjunction with William Carey (1761–1834) [q. v.], to publish William Roxburgh's ‘Flora Indica,’ to which he added much original matter; but his zeal as a collector of new plants was greater than his patience in working up existing materials, so that Carey was left to complete the work alone. Meanwhile Wallich was officially directed in this year to explore Nepal; and, besides sending many plants home to Banks, Smith, Lambert, Rudge, and Roscoe (Memoir and Correspondence of Sir James Edward Smith, ii. 246, 262), issued two fascicles of his ‘Tentamen Floræ Napalensis Illustratæ, consisting of Botanical Descriptions and Lithographic Figures of select Nipal Plants,’ printed at the recently established Asiatic Lithographic Press, Serampore, 1824 and 1826, folio. In 1825 he inspected the forests of Western Hindostan, and in 1826 and 1827 those of Ava and Lower Burma. Invalided home in 1828, he brought with him some eight thousand specimens of plants, duplicates of which were widely distributed to both public and private collections. ‘A Numerical List of Dried Specimens of Plants in the East India Company's Museum, collected under the Superintendence of Dr. Wallich’ (London, 1828, folio), contains in all 9,148 species. The best set of these was presented by the company to the Linnean Society. In 1830, 1831, and 1832 Wallich published his most important work, ‘Plantæ Asiaticæ Rariores; or Descriptions and Figures of a Select Number of unpublished East Indian Plants’ (London, 3 vols. folio). He then returned to India, where, among other official duties, he made an extensive exploration of Assam with reference to the discovery of the wild tea shrub. He finally returned to England in 1847; and, on his resignation of his post in 1850, he was succeeded by John Scott, gardener to the Duke of Devonshire
