Biography

Scottish botanist who collected plants in Chile in the 1860s-1870s. Thomas King was born on a farm in Renfrewshire, where a romantic landscape of heather-topped hills nurtured his love of nature. A delicate child, he was schooled at home in his early years. In 1854 the King family sold the farm and moved to Glasgow, where Thomas King trained as a teacher at the Normal Training College of the Free Church of Scotland. He then taught in schools in Paisley and Chryston until 1862, studying botany in his spare time, before being appointed teacher of English and botany at Garnet Bank Academy in Glasgow. Within two years, however, poor health provoked him to seek out a more genial climate and he thus set sail from Liverpool to join one of his brothers who resided in Chile. The warm weather boosted his constitution and he took up a teaching post as well as collecting many birds, insects, shells and plants.

He met several South American botanists including R.A. Philippi, professor of natural history at the University of Chile, to whom he sent his collections for determination. In the late 1860s King's brother went to work on a mineral railway in the Atacama Desert. King took every opportunity to visit him there, where he found plants seldom seen in the south of the country and discovered 29 new species as described by Philippi in 1872-1873. Some of these Philippi named after King and one after Chile's then new president, Errazurizia glandulifera Ph. King also gathered seeds of ornamental flowers for introduction to Britain and presented a number of these to Kew in 1892.

In 1873, after nine years in Chile, he decided to visit his homeland. He took several classes in botany at the University of Glasgow and, finding his health much improved, decided to shelve his plans to return to Chile. From 1877 he taught botany at various institutions and in 1889 was appointed professor of botany at the Anderson's College Medical School and the Glasgow Veterinary College. He maintained an active interest in other natural sciences and was a member of the Geological Society of Glasgow, the Glasgow Society of Field Naturalists and the Natural History Society of Glasgow as well as the Glasgow Eastern Botanical Society. He was president of the Natural History Society of Glasgow from 1893 until his death. After helping to organise the 1879 Cryptogamic Society of Scotland annual conference in Glasgow, King began to devote more and more of his energies to mycology. He was also a founder of the Microscopial Society of Glasgow, instituted in 1884. A pious Christian, King's character was said to be very gentle and unobtrusive, cheerful with a quiet humour.

Sources:
Anon., 1896, "In memoriam Professor Thomas King", Transactions of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, 5: 1-17
H.S. Maxwell and M.F. Gardner, 1997, "The quest for Chilean green treasure: some notable British collectors before 1940", The New Plantsman, 4(4): 205-206.