TWO BOTANISTS,A FINANCIAL CRISIS AND BRITAIN'S FIRST EMBASSY TO CHINA

This essay reveals a financial dimension to Captain John Blake and his son John Bradby Blake's involvement with China, namely, their participation in financing the Canton trade through predatory loans to Chinese Hong merchants. Widespread predatory lending in Canton led to a financial crisis during the late 1770s, which ruined several British and Chinese merchants. In an effort to recover the money they claimed was owed to them, many British traders, including John Blake, formed a lobby group in London and authorized Britain's first Ambassador to China to negotiate with the Emperor in Beijing on their behalf.     

THE JOHN BRADBY BLAKE DRAWINGS IN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM,LONDON: JOSEPH BANKS PUTS THEM TO WORK

In the last quarter of the 18th century, Joseph Banks came into possession of a set of botanically accurate, western‐influenced, drawings of Chinese plants, executed in Canton by a Chinese artist and supervised by John Bradby Blake, an East India Company supercargo. Banks realized that these drawings, now in the Natural History Museum, London, would help his collectors in Canton accurately identify the Chinese species he sought as living plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew. Banks commissioned a collector's manual whose illustrations were based on the Blake drawings. In the early 19th century, William Kerr used this manual (now unfortunately lost) to continue the Blake practice – these drawings are at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. John Reeves, many of whose drawings are at the Royal Horticultural Society, used Kerr's commissions to produce the next generation of botanical art in Canton.     

JOHN BRADBY BLAKE'S MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY: FROM WORDLIST TO WORLDVIEW

The unique illustrated and annotated ‘Chinese‐English Vocabulary’ 1 (hereafter ‘Vocabulary’) in the John Bradby Blake collection in the library of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation is described, along with the composition of individual entries and their arrangement. Analysis of the contents suggests that the Vocabulary was composed in a multi‐layered process beginning with the illustration and main Chinese characters, which were then annotated by two other individuals, most likely John Bradby Blake himself and perhaps Whang at Tong. The layers of the Vocabulary document an attempt at cross‐cultural exchange, with equivalences being proposed, explanations offered, and meanings contested. Situating the Vocabulary in the history of Chinese language learning and the more general history of bilingual wordlists reveals various types of precedents and related material, but it is unique in the history of Chinese‐English lexicography and what it has to teach us about the worldview of its authors and mid‐Qing intellectual knowledge exchange between British and Southern Chinese.     

THE ‘ENGLISH EXPERIENCE’ AMONG THE HUMBLEST CHINESE IN THE CANTON TRADE ERA (1700s‐1842)

This article puts into context the unusual experience of Whang at Tong, the Chinese boy who was brought by John Bradby Blake from Canton to England, against a wider background of 18th and 19th century Canton where a considerable number of Chinese made a living from foreign trade. Referencing various sources and circumstantial materials, I suggest that prior to his first departure for England, Whang at Tong had already been exposed to an English‐Chinese environment in which he was able to make a living by being an in‐between person, perhaps also picking up some English with a few English‐learning kits. He might have benefited from existing foreign knowledge circulated in Canton when he was young; he might also have contributed to the enhancement of this pool of knowledge after he returned home from England in the 1780s. The experiences of Whang at Tong thus open a window to reconsider how cultural encounters between East and West could have taken place, including especially among ordinary people on a daily basis.     

THE LIFE AND WORK OF JOHN BRADBY BLAKE

John Bradby Blake (1745–1773) first visited Canton as a supercargo for the British East India Company in 1767/68. He returned as a resident supercargo in July 1769. Between then and his untimely death in 1773, in collaboration with one or more Chinese artists, he produced over 150 paintings of Chinese plants, many of which are illustrated in exquisite botanical detail. These paintings and the associated archives in the Oak Spring Garden Library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) provide a detailed glimpse into an interesting life and a previously little known dimension of the social and scientific interactions between the British and Chinese in the late 18th century.     

FOLLOWING THE THREAD TO OAK SPRING: THE AFTERLIFE OF JOHN BRADBY BLAKE'S CANTON DRAWINGS

For more than 175 years, the remarkable botanical drawings made in Canton by a Chinese artist working with the British East India Company supercargo John Bradby Blake, were handed down from generation to generation within the same family. They first appeared publicly in 1959 when the estate of Sir Frederick Cripps of Ampney Park, Gloucestershire, came up for auction. A Bristol art dealer bought the drawings, but on the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Mellon had other ideas for them. This article follows the trail from London, via Ampney Park and Bristol, to Oak Spring, Virginia.     

JOHN BRADBY BLAKE AND JAMES KERR: HYBRID BOTANICAL ART,CANTON AND BENGAL,c. 1770

The collection of botanical paintings commissioned by John Bradby Blake (1745–1773) from a Chinese artist in Canton c. 1770, is one of the star items in the outstanding collection of botanical books and paintings assembled by Rachel Lambert Mellon and now housed in the library of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. A remarkably similar collection, commissioned from several Indian artists by Dr. James Kerr (1737–1782) in Bengal and Bihar, is now scattered among the collections of the Natural History Museum London, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the New York Botanical Garden. Discussion of the Blake and Kerr collections is preceded by some introductory background to the creation of such art – its hybrid nature, its role in the visual documentation of useful plants in European, Asian and colonial contexts, and the botanical and artistic networks in which the two collections were created.     

JOHN BRADBY BLAKE,THE CHINESE TALLOW TREE AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF BOTANICAL EXPERIMENTATION

Recent studies of the spread of the invasive Chinese tallow tree, , Triadica sebifera (L.) Small, downplay the role of the dissemination of seeds in the 18th century compared with the impact of 20th century state‐sponsored agriculture. But the long‐term development of Chinese, then European and American botanical knowledge, even in cases like the tallow tree, can be shown to have enabled and legitimized ecological expansion and large scale environmental experimentation. John Bradby Blake, who obtained, experimented with, described and illustrated tallow tree seed in the 1770s, played an important role in the dissemination of tallow trees to the southeastern American colonies, the British Caribbean and northeast India.     

INTRODUCTION

The Oak Spring Garden Library, a legacy of Rachel Lambert Mellon (1910–2014) and now part of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, contains the archive of John Bradby Blake (1745–1773), a young trader who worked for the British East India Company in the late 1760s and early 1770s in Canton (Guangzhou) and Macau. The archive provides an unusually detailed insight into Bradby Blake's life and botanical work, including his attempts to send living plants back to England. The archive also contains almost 200 pieces of exquisitely detailed early British‐Chinese hybrid botanical art, which Bradby Blake prepared with a Chinese artist, Mauk‐Sow‐U. With their emphasis on botanical detail and careful depiction of the detailed structure of flowers, these illustrations are as accurate as any produced at this relatively early date in the post‐Linnaean development of botanical science.     

THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY,JOHN BRADBY BLAKE AND THEIR INTERESTS IN SPICES,COTTON AND TEA

The British East India Company was founded to compete with the Dutch in the lucrative trade in spices, but the Company soon abandoned this attempt and concentrated instead on trading cotton goods from the Indian subcontinent, initially to Britain, but subsequently to China in part‐exchange for tea. Dutch control of spice prices and the drain on Company finances of paying the Chinese for ever‐increasing quantities of tea led to attempts to introduce some of the species concerned to British colonies with appropriate climates. As the Company's resident supercargo in Canton, John Bradby Blake collected and sent back to Britain various species for introduction to the Americas, and drew and painted these and many others. Few of these attempted introductions succeeded, but the surviving paintings constitute his lasting legacy.     

THE PLANTS OF JOHN BRADBY BLAKE

Analysis of the John Bradby Blake plant illustrations in the library of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation identifies a total of 138 species belonging to over 100 genera and 62 families. Especially well‐represented are useful plants of all kinds, including a high proportion of plants that are used in Chinese traditional medicine.     

‘THOROUGHLY CHINESE’: REVEALING THE PLANTS OF THE HONG MERCHANTS' GARDENS THROUGH JOHN BRADBY BLAKE'S PAINTINGS

The paintings in the John Bradby Blake collection should be admired for their sophisticated artistry and accurate depiction of botanical features, but they are also significant because they reveal the diversity of plants grown in the gardens of Chinese in Guangzhou (Canton). They therefore provide a precious insight into a relatively neglected topic in Chinese garden history, namely the cultivation of plants in gardens. This paper identifies one of the gardens from which the plants depicted by John Bradby Blake might have come, and looks at how those plants were used and appreciated in their Chinese context.     

DISTINGUISHING CAUSES OF VIRULENCE EVOLUTION: REPLY TO ALIZON AND MICHALAKIS

In a recent study of the symbiosis between bacteria and plasmids, the available evidence suggests that experimental evolution of plasmid virulence was primarily driven by within‐host competition caused by superinfection. The data do not exclude the possibility, however, that a trade‐off between virulence and infectious transmission to uninfected bacteria also played a minor role.     

1 July 1858: what Wallace knew; what Lyell thought he knew; what both he and Hooker took on trust; and what Charles Darwin never told them

At the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, using only an extract from Charles Darwin's unpublished essay of 1844, and a copy of a recent letter to Asa Gray in Boston, argued successfully that Darwin understood how species originate long before a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining his own version of the theory of evolution arrived at Darwin's home. That letter from Ternate in the Malay Archipelago, however, was not the first letter Darwin received from Wallace. This article will contend that two of the three letters Wallace sent Darwin between 10 October 1856 and 9 March 1858 arrived much earlier than Darwin recorded, thereby allowing him time to assess Wallace's ideas and claim an independent understanding of how the operation of divergence and extinction in the natural world leads strongly marked varieties to be identified as new species. By the time of the Linnean meeting Darwin's new ideas had filtered into his letters and ‘big’ species book, despite the absence of any independent evidence from the natural world to justify his constant insistence to have been guided only by inductive reasoning. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2013, 109 , 725–736.     

THE DUTY TO DIE AND THE BURDENSOMENESS OF LIVING

This article addresses the question of whether the arguments for a duty to die given by John Hardwig, the most prominent philosophical advocate of such a duty, are sound. Hardwig believes that the duty to die is relatively widespread among those with burdensome illnesses, dependencies, or medical conditions. I argue that although there are rare circumstances in which individuals have a duty to die, the situations Hardwig describes are not among these. After reconstructing Hardwig's argument for such a duty, highlighting his central premise that ill, dependent, or aged individuals can impose unfair burdens upon others by continuing to live, I clarify precisely what Hardwig intends by his thesis that many of us have a duty to die. I then show that an important disanalogy exists between an uncontroversial example in which an individual has a duty to die and the situations in which Hardwig proposes individuals have a duty to die. More specifically, in situations where a duty to die exists, an individual's having a duty to die logically implies that those she burdens have a right to kill that individual in self‐defense. I then suggest that the burdens that ill, dependent, or aged individuals impose on their families, loved ones, or caregivers do not constitute the kind of threat that warrants the latter killing the former in self‐defense. Hence, the duty to die is much rarer than Hardwig supposes.     

BOTANICAL COLLECTING IN 18TH‐CENTURY LONDON

The correspondence exchanged between Captain John Blake, John Bradby Blake, and their associates offers a valuable insight into the sociable world of Enlightenment botany. By considering these sources alongside the records of other contemporary scholars of botany, this paper examines the composition of the community of plant collectors and botanical scholars with whom father and son were interacting in the 1760s and 1770s. The documents also reveal the ways in which botanical knowledge circulated among the members of these communities. Amateur botany, it turns out, was deeply linked to gardening and to the emerging trade in horticultural plants, yet the contributions made by gardeners and nurserymen have been largely overlooked. In sum, the Blake collection at Oak Spring helps to answer larger questions about the nature of Enlightenment sociability, about diversity within botanical networks, and about the ways in which that social diversity affected botanical collecting.     

Discovering gorilla

On July 16, 1847, a missionary newly arrived in New York City from West Africa packed a collection of bones in a box and shipped them off to a colleague in Massachusetts. In a letter, Thomas S. Savage (Fig. 1), a graduate of Yale College and Yale Medical School, admitted to being “quite unwell,” probably meaning “utterly wretched.” He had already endured tropical diseases in Liberia off and on for more than a decade, and he'd seen his first two wives languish and die there, probably of malaria. He wasn't the sort to complain lightly.     

Introduction of soybean to North America by Samuel Bowen in 1765

This paper documents the history of the introduction of the soybean (Glycine max), a domesticate of China, to North America. Henry Yonge, the Surveyor-General of Georgia, planted soybeans on his farm at the request of Samuel Bowen in 1765. Mr. Bowen, a former seaman employed by the East India Company, brought soybeans to Savannah, Georgia, from China via London. From 1766, Mr. Bowen planted soybeans on his plantation “Greenwich” located at Thunderbolt, Georgia. The soybeans were used to manufacture soy sauce and vermicelli (soybean noodles). In addition, he manufactured a sago powder substitute made from sweet potatoes. The 3 products were then exported to England. Samuel Bowen received a patent for his manufacturing inventions for producing these products. Another early introduction of soybeans to North America was by Benjamin Franklin. In 1770 he sent seeds from London to John Bartram in Philadelphia.     

约翰·韦伯斯特——同事,良师益友,菌物学家（英文）

<正>John Webster played an important role in the history of the University of Exeter as a mentor,a colleague and an important influence on successive generations of fungal biologists.My first encounter with John Webster was as a young Lecturer,newly appointed in late 1993 to the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Exeter.I spoke to John about joining him on one     

MORAL ENHANCEMENT VIA DIRECT EMOTION MODULATION: A REPLY TO JOHN HARRIS

Some argue that humans should enhance their moral capacities by adopting institutions that facilitate morally good motives and behaviour. I have defended a parallel claim: that we could permissibly use biomedical technologies to enhance our moral capacities, for example by attenuating certain counter‐moral emotions. John Harris has recently responded to my argument by raising three concerns about the direct modulation of emotions as a means to moral enhancement. He argues (1) that such means will be relatively ineffective in bringing about moral improvements, (2) that direct modulation of emotions would invariably come at an unacceptable cost to our freedom, and (3) that we might end up modulating emotions in ways that actually lead to moral decline. In this article I outline some counter‐intuitive potential implications of Harris' claims. I then respond individually to his three concerns, arguing that they license only the very weak conclusion that moral enhancement via direct emotion modulation is sometimes impermissible. However I acknowledge that his third concern might, with further argument, be developed into a more troubling objection to such enhancements.