Biography

Dutch botanist who served at the Herbarium Bogoriense in Java (1919-1932) and at the Rijksherbarium in Leiden. Herman Lam was an authority on the flora of the Malay region, where he made many collections. He was born at Veendam and grew up in Rotterdam where his father was a chemist. Despite interruption due to military service, he completed his biology undergraduate and master's degrees at the State University, Utrecht (1911-1917). Specialising in plant taxonomy, he gained his PhD in 1919 (with a thesis on Verbenaceae of the Malay Archipelago) and afterwards married Johanna de Bruïne (whom he divorced two years later).

In the same year Lam travelled to Indonesia to take up the position of Assistant at the Herbarium Bogoriense in Buitenzorg (later known as Bogor). Engaged in systematics and biogeography research, over the next 14 years he participated in expeditions to New Guinea (1921-1922), the Moluccas (1926) and Sulawesi (1932). (Lam's biographical entry in Flora Malesiana give details of his expedition itineraries.) He married his second wife, Cornelia Moorrees, in 1922 with whom he had a daughter in 1925.

In 1929 Lam took leave in Europe and was honoured with the Order of Oranje-Nassau. On his return to the Herbarium Bogoriense he was promoted to the rank of botanist and in 1932 became director of the Treub Laboratory at Buitenzorg Botanic Gardens and a professor at the Medical College in Batavia. He did not remain long in these roles, however, for he returned to the Netherlands the following year to take up the directorship of the National Herbarium at Leiden. He was also made an associate professor of botany (full professor from 1945) at the University of Leiden.

Lam had a tough task in Leiden, for the herbarium had fallen into a lamentable state by the time he took office. Nevertheless, as the dust settled following the end of World War Two he managed to raise it up to the level of an international research centre with a focus on tropical Asian plants. Lam initiated the Flora Malesiana series and founded the Leiden journal Blumea. Among his other achievements, Lam can be credited with bringing into use the term 'taxon' in botany. First used as a zoological term in the 1920s, Lam proposed in 1948 that it to be used to refer to plant categories and it was formally adopted at the VII International Botanical Congress held in 1950.

From the time of his return to Europe Lam had several further opportunities to collect plants in other countries. He visited South Africa in 1938 on a trip to improve ties with universities there, also taking the opportunity to explore Madagascar. Soon after his return he was off to California for the Sixth Pacific Science Congress. Work at the herbarium was severely constrained during the war years and it was a decade until his next foreign trip, to New Zealand in 1949 for the Seventh Pacific Science Congress. While on that side of the world he also collected nearly 500 numbers in Fiji, New Caledonia, Hawaii and California. He returned to the Antipodes in 1954, attending a congress in Australia for which he travelled out via Sri Lanka. On the way back he stopped at his former stomping ground, New Guinea, where he had not set foot for more than two decades.

Lam's last few years at the Rijksherbarium and Leiden University were as busy as ever. In 1958 he served as Rector at the university and was much occupied with organising an expedition to the Star Mountains in New Guinea. He was made a Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Australia in Perth in the 1950s, but had to wait until 1960 to become a member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences. In 1962, at the event of his retiring from the Rijksherbarium, so many people wanted to attend his farewell that the ceremony had to be held in the City Theatre, which was filled to capacity on the occasion. As well as his collections and work on plant geography, Lam had completed many papers on plants in the Verbenaceae and Sapotaceae families, and on morphology and phylogenetics. He said he found teaching difficult, but was remembered by his students for some entertaining lectures. He died in 1977 following a series of strokes.

Sources:
M. Jacobs, 1984, Herman Johannes Lam (1892-1977): the life and work of a Dutch botanist.