William Roxburgh - Career

Career

At Madras he turned his attention to botany. The East India Company recognized his botanical knowledge and made him superintendent in the Samalkot garden in the Northern Circars in 1781. Here he conducted economic botany experiments. He employed native artists to illustrate plants. He had 700 illustrations by 1790. He then succeeded Patrick Russell (1727–1805) as Naturalist to the Madras Government. He made rapid progress and acquired a good reputation and was in a short time invited by the government of Bengal, to take charge of the Calcutta Botanical gardens from Colonel Robert Kyd. In 1793 he succeeded Colonel Robert Kyd as Superintendent of the Company garden at Sibpur near Calcutta. A catalog of the garden was made in 1814 – Hortus Bengalensis. He sent many of his illustrations to Sir Joseph Banks. He was succeeded by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton.

He meticulously collected vast amounts of meteorological data for years, and is considered as a pioneer in the collection of tropical meteorological data, to an extent unrivalled elsewhere until the 1820s. He had begun collecting detailed meteorological data as soon as he set foot in India, at Madras, and is known to have taken measurements three times a day, using Ramsden barometers and Nairne thermometers, made by then reputed scientific instrument makers, Jesse Ramsden and Edward Nairne. He trained under John Hope, who was the curator of the Edinburgh botanical garden as well an experimental physiologist. Roxburgh's interest in systematic meteorology may have stemmed from the influence of John Hope as well as his experiences at the Royal Society of Arts which, in the early 1770s, was greatly influenced by the climatic theories of Stephen Hales and Duhamel du Monceau. Such detailed measurements over many years led him to form an opinion on widespread famine and climate change in the empire.

He became a member of the Asiatic Society, to whose Transactions he contributed, from time to time, many valuable papers. Amongst these was one of singular interest on the lacca insect, from which the substance lac is made.