John Sibthorp (28 October 1758 – 8 February 1796) was an
English botanist.
He was born in
Oxford, the youngest son of Dr
Humphry Sibthorp (1713–1797), who from 1747 to 1784 was Sherardian professor of botany at the
University of Oxford.
He graduated from
Lincoln College, Oxford in 1777, and then studied
medicine at the Universities of
Edinburgh and
Montpellier. In 1784 he succeeded his father to the Sherardian chair. Leaving his professional duties to a deputy, he left England for
Göttingen and
Vienna, in preparation for a botanical tour of
Greece (1786) and
Cyprus (1787).
Returning to England at the end of the following year, he took part in the foundation of the
Linnean Society in 1788, and set to work on a
Flora of
Oxfordshire, which was published in 1794 as
Flora Oxoniensis. He was elected as a
Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar 1788.
He made a second journey to Greece, but developed
consumption on the way home and died in
Bath on 8 February 1796. He was buried at Bath Abbey.
His will bequeathed his books on
natural history and
agriculture to the University of Oxford, and also founded Oxford's Sibthorpian Professorship of Rural Economy (subsequently titled the Sibthorpian Professorship of Plant Science and currently held by Prof. Nicholas Harberd, MA, PhD, FRS). He directed that his endowment should first be applied to the publication of his
Flora Graeca and
Florae Graecae Prodromus, for which, however, he...
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