United States botanist. A world authority on the floristics of the Guiana Highlands, Bassett Maguire, who was born in Alabama City, Alabama, made his first visit to the region in 1925, as an undergraduate student in the University of Pittsburgh's field program in tropical ecology at Kartabo, British Guiana. Not long after receiving his BSc from the University of Georgia, he was appointed head of science at his former high school in Savannah, Georgia, and also began doctoral studies at Cornell University, which he eventually completed in 1938. In 1931, he was appointed assistant professor of botany at Utah State University, where he started the Intermountain Herbarium and served as its principal collector and curator until 1942. In 1943, he left Utah to join the staff of the New York Botanical Garden, and until his death in 1991 served there successively as curator, coordinator of tropical botany, head curator, Nathanial Lord Britton Distinguished Senior Curator, assistant director, director of botany, senior scientist, and senior scientist emeritus.

He gradually relinquished work on the Intermountain Flora to his former students Noel Holmgren and Arthur Cronquist, as his own interests turned increasingly to tropical America, particularly the sandstone highlands of Venezuela, Brazil, and the Guianas. In his first year at the botanical garden, he organised expeditions to the Kaieteur escarpment in British Guiana and to central Suriname, where he named one of the cascades on Tafelberg after his Uncle Augustus, who had given him the money for his first trip back in 1925. In 1948 he ascended to the summit of Cerro Sipapo, and two years later made a trip to Venezuela with graduate students Richard Cowan and John Wurdack, who became his frequent co-collectors. He also collected with his second wife, Celia Kramer, whom he married in 1951.

Undoubtedly the most dramatic and important of his discoveries occurred on an expedition to Venezuela in 1953-1954, with his wife and John Wurdack. After completing their exploration of the Amazonas, they decided to extend the trip to retrace the path of the English explorer Richard Spruce. Travelling up the Yatua to Laja Catipan, they discovered an unknown mountain, which Maguire named Cerro de la Neblina. Straddling the Venezuelan-Brazilian border, Cerro de la Neblina is one of the most botanically rich table mountains of the region, and its discovery earned Maguire the David Livingstone Centenary Medal by the American Geographical Society in 1965.

Throughout the 1960s, Maguire collected extensively with Julian Steyermark on the sandstone escarpment and northern slopes of the upper Cuyuni in Venezuela and in the southern Pakaraima Mountains in British Guiana. With his wife, he collected in the upper Rio Cuyuni and rios Uiri and Chicanan, Venezuela, in 1962 and between 1966 and 1969 visited most countries of Central America, as well as Peru, Colombia, and Puerto Rico. Maguire officially retired in 1975, but until the last year of his life he continued to work every day on his major research project, The Botany of the Guayana Highlands, and on monographic studies. He was founder and president of the Association of Tropical Biology, executive director of the Organization for Flora Neotropica, and a founder of the Organization for Tropical Studies.

Sources:
K.F. Lauby, 1991, "Bassett Maguire (1904-1991)", Taxon, 40(3): 531-532
A.A. Narvaez, 1991, "Bassett Maguire, 86, A Botanist and Expedition Leader, is Dead", New York Times, February 8, 1991
S. Sinon and C. Maguire, 2008, Bassett Maguire Biographical Note and Collection Finding Aid, New York Botanical Garden Archives and Manuscripts:
http://library.nybg.org/finding_guide/archv/herbarium_rg4b.html.