John Joseph Bennett (8 January 1801 – 29 February 1876) was a British
botanist.
Bennett was assistant keeper of the
Banksian herbarium and library at the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
from 1827 to 1858, when he succeeded
Robert Brown as Keeper of the Botanical Department. He retired in 1870. He was secretary of the
Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is a learned society dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history, evolution, and taxonomy. It possesses several important biological specimen, manuscript and literature colle ...
from 1840 to 1860. He was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
in 1841, and was elected member of
Leopoldina Leopoldina may refer to:
* Colônia Leopoldina, a Brazilian municipality in the state of Alagoa
* Leopoldina, Minas Gerais, a Brazilian municipality in the state of Minas Gerais
* Maria Leopoldina of Austria (1797-1826), consort of emperor Pedro I ...
in 1864.
On the evening of 30 June 1858,
Charles Lyell and
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (30 June 1817 – 10 December 1911) was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For twenty years he served as director of ...
passed on to him papers by
Alfred Russel Wallace and
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended ...
, titled "
" respectively.
As secretary of the Linnean Society at a meeting on the following evening, 1 July, he read out the papers together with a covering note by Lyell and Hooker.
This was the joint publication by Darwin and Wallace of their papers setting out the theory of
natural selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...
, which was received quietly at the time but attracted wide interest when Darwin published ''
On the Origin of Species
''On the Origin of Species'' (or, more completely, ''On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life''),The book's full original title was ''On the Origin of Species by Me ...
'' eighteen months later.
See also
*
Publication of Darwin's theory
The publication of Darwin's theory brought into the open Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, the culmination of more than twenty years of work.
Thoughts on the possibility of transmutation of species which he recorde ...
Notes
References
*
*
*
* Retrieved 2006-12-15
1801 births
1876 deaths
British botanists
Botanists with author abbreviations
Employees of the Natural History Museum, London
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the Linnean Society of London
{{UK-botanist-stub