The Saint, the Surgeon and the Unsung Botanist
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David Hilton Barber traces the ancestry of his and other Pioneering South African families. Going back five generations, this highly entertaining, factual and interesting book is full of snippets of life at the turn of the last century. (the Saint) Frederick York St Leger was a classical scholar first, a clergyman second and the founder and first editor of the Cape Times. He was ordained in 1857 and for 14 years was an Anglican priest in the Eastern Cape (he was the second headmaster of St Andrews School).
In 1871, at the age of 38, in an extraordinary change of course, he resigned his living with the church and took his family to the newly-opened diamond fields in Kimberley. In 1876 he returned to Cape Town to found the first daily newspaper in South Africa which grew steadily in stature and influence to become the leading paper in South Africa by the early 1990s. (the Surgeon) Dr William Guybon Atherstone made a profound contribution to medical science, geology and natural history placing him firmly in the forefront of South African pioneers.
He performed the first operation in South Africa under anaesthetics. He identified the first diamond discovered near Kimberley. He co-discovered the first dinosaur fossil in South Africa. He was given the Freedom of London. In Grahamstown, he was the originator of the Botanical Gardens and the founder of the Scientific and Literary Society, later the Albany Museum. He was also an artist, a musician and an astronomer of no mean repute.
(the Unsung Botanist) Mary Elizabeth Barber Although having no formal education, yet through her observation and knowledge of natural history, she developed a lifelong correspondence with Charles Darwin whom she supplied with much valuable information for the Origin of Species (1859). Eight of her numerous monographs on South African botantical, entomological and zoological subjects were published by the Linnaean and other learned societies in Europe.
As an artist of no mean attainments, Mary Elizabeth greatly enhanced the value and effect of her scientific observations with drawings and painting of professional standards - birds, reptiles, plants and moths and butterflies.