Alfred Barton Rendle

Alfred Barton Rendle FRS (January 19 1865 - January 11 1938) was an English botanist.

Rendle was born in Lewisham and studied at St John's College, Cambridge. He was keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum from 1906 to 1930, in succession to George Robert Milne Murray.

In 1905, Rendle attended the International Botanical Congress in Vienna, where he was appointed on to the editorial committee for the "International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature" (now superseded by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature,) a role which he continued in until 1935.

Rendle published a number of books. Perhaps the best known of these was "The Classification of Flowering Plants", which saw a gap of over 20 years between the publication of its two volumes - the first was published in 1904, but readers had to wait until 1925 for volume two. This long gap was attributed by Rendle to his "increasing official and non-official duties". He was also botany editor for the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, published in 1911.

Rendle was president of the Linnean Society from 1923 to 1927.

References

*Stearn, William T. - "The Natural History Museum at South Kensington" ISBN 0-434-73600-7
*Prain, D - " [http://www.jstor.org/pss/769004 Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society] ", Vol. 2, No. 7 (Jan., 1939), pp. 511-517

External link

* [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35727 Rendle, Alfred Barton (1865-1938), botanist] by D. E. Allen in Dictionary of National Biography