Biography

Edwin Butler was an Irish mycologist and plant pathologist who worked for 20 years in India and served as Director of the Imperial Bureau of Mycology at Kew.

Butler was born in Kilkee, County Clare, and studied medicine at Queen's College, Cork (now University College Cork). After his graduation in 1898 he did not practise, however, but pursued his interest in mycology, which had developed under the influence of Professor Marcus Hartog. Butler thus began to make studies of the parasitic fungus Pythium and the water mould Saprolegnia, which he collected from the Queen's College ponds. He studied mycology at Kew, Paris and Freiburg, and in 1901 was appointed Cryptogamic Botanist to the Indian Government.

Initially based in Calcutta, Butler worked with the Botanical Survey of India. He was then transferred to Dehra Dun in 1902 and in 1905 to the Agricultural Research Station at Pusa. In 1906 he was appointed Imperial Mycologist and from 1910 was also Director of the Agricultural College in Pusa.

Butler carried out important studies on the diseases of palms and sugar cane, on wheat rusts and pigeon pea wilt. His Fungi and Diseases in Plants (1918) became a reference work for tropical plant pathologists. It was later revised under the title Plant Pathology, for a European audience. Butler is credited with identifying 150 species of plant pathogenic fungi.

In 1921 Butler left India and settled in London, having been appointed Director of the new Imperial Bureau of Mycology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He was awarded the Order of the Indian Empire for his work in the country, and in 1926 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was president of the British Mycological Society in 1927 and the Association of Economic Biologists in 1928–9, and in 1938, the University of Aberdeen awarded him an honorary LLD. He published Fungi of India with G.R. Bisby in 1930.

Butler stepped down from his position at Kew in 1935. During his time there he had made contributions to the knowledge of Panama disease in bananas, witch's broom disease in Trinidad cocoa and yellow leaf disease of tea in Nyasaland. He was knighted in 1939 in recognition of his work. Butler died four years later, of influenza. The Butler Medal of the Society of Irish Plant Pathologists is named in his honour, as is the Butler Building at University College Cork.

Sources:
G.C. Ainsworth, 2004, "Butler, Sir Edwin John (1874-1943)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37251, accessed 17 October 2012
E.W. Mason, 1943, "Edwin John Butler. 1874-1943" Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 4(12): 455-426
University College Cork, Edwin Butler:
www.ucc.ie/en/bees/whatwedo/edwinbutler/, accessed 17 October 2012.