Henry Nicholas Ridley CMG (1911), MA (Oxon), FRS,

Life

thumb|left|upright|Ridley beside a Hevea with herring-bone pattern bark incisions to tap rubber.

Henry Ridley was the second son and third child born to Louisa Pole Stuart and Oliver Matthew Ridley in West Harling in Norfolk, where his father was the Rector. At the age of three his mother died and his father moved to Cobham in Kent. He studied at Tonbridge School and then went to Haileybury where his brother Stuart also studied. At Cobham, he had taken to the idea of collecting insects and he continued this at Haileybury where the school encouraged him to publish a "List of the Mammals and Coleoptera of Haileybury". The two brothers left Haileybury and Henry went to a private tutor at Medmenham near Henley who encouraged him in Zoology and then went to Exeter College, Oxford where he studied under Edwin Ray Lankester and George Rolleston while also taking an interest in botany and geology under the influence of Marmaduke Lawson and Joseph Prestwich. He graduated in 1878 and received a Burdett-Coutts scholarship that let him conduct research on fossils from quarries near Oxford. He then joined the British Museum in the botany department to replace Henry Trimen who had moved to Ceylon. He specialised in the monocotyledons and also began to travel around Europe. In 1887 he joined the Royal Society expedition with George Ramage to the island of Fernando de Noronha off Brazil, and published on the collections on returning. In 1888 he applied and was selected for the post of director of Gardens and Forests in the Straits Settlements. He was to meet Odoardo Beccari at Florence for information and to meet Trimen at Peradeniya to learn about rubber cultivation along the route. Ridley established the methods for harvesting latex from Pará rubber plants which had been introduced ten years earlier by Sir Hugh Low apart from starting a zoological section in the gardens in 1870. Ridley explored the regions around including Penang and Malacca. In 1894 his post was abolished as the expenditure was found to exceed the revenues obtained. Ridley returned briefly to England but the removal of the post was however objected to by William Turner Thiselton-Dyer and Ridley went back to Selangor to advise on forest reservation. In 1895, he discovered a means of tapping which did not seriously damage the rubber trees. where he resided for twenty years. The area under Pará rubber slowly increased after 1898 when a Chinese landowner, Tan Chay Yan, grew 40 acres successfully, leading to more people taking to rubber cultivation. On his 100th birthday in 1955 he received a visit from the High Commissioner of the soon-to-be independent Malaya.

Publications

A near-complete list of publications can be found in the 80th birthday dedication issue of the Gardens' Bulletin (1935). The following are a few selected publications.

Eponymous species

Several species are named after Henry Ridley, including Diospyros ridleyi, Stenolepis ridleyi, and Amphisbaena ridleyi. It has been claimed that the olive ridley sea turtle is named after him, but this has been questioned as there is insufficient evidence. It is more likely that the turtle's common name comes from the word "riddle".

Then in 1998, botanists A.Weber & B.L.Burtt published Ridleyandra, a genus of about 30 species of flowering plants from Borneo, Malay and Thailand, belonging to the family Gesneriaceae and it also was named in Ridley's honour.

See also

References

  • Henry Nicholas Ridley