George Murray (naturalist)

George Robert Milne Murray FRS FLS (11 November 1858 – 16 December 1911) was a Scottish naturalist, botanist, diatomist and algologist, noted for his association with T. H. Huxley and with the Discovery Expedition.^[1] He was the naturalist aboard the solar eclipse expedition to the West Indies in 1886, and was a member of several scientific voyages for the collection of marine organisms, leading valuable work on the Atlantic coast of Ireland in 1898.

Life

Murray was born in Arbroath, Angus, and educated at Arbroath High School. In 1875, he studied cryptogamic botany at the University of Strasbourg under Anton de Bary. He became an assistant in the Department of Botany at the Natural History Museum, succeeding William Carruthers as Keeper of Botany in 1895. He retired in 1905 due to ill-health. He wrote a Handbook of Cryptogamic Botany (1889) and an Introduction to the Study of Seaweeds with A. W. Bennett, and published about forty articles on cryptogams and oceanography, mostly in the Journal of Botany.

He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1897.

Murray edited 'The Antarctic Manual' in 1901 and set out on Robert Falcon Scott's National Antarctic Expedition of that year although leaving the 'Discovery' at Cape Town.

He died in Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, on 16 December 1911.

References

•  Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Murray, George Robert Milne". Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement​. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 

Notes