George Bennett
(1804-1893)
was born at Plymouth, England. On leaving school he visited Ceylon in 1819,
and on his return studied for the medical profession. He obtained the degree
of M.R.C.S. in 1828, and later F.R.C.S. After qualifying as a physician he
obtained employment as a ship's surgeon, and visited Sydney in 1829. ln 1832
his friend Richard Owen was engaged in examining the structure and relations of
the mammary glands of the
Ornithorhyncus
(the platypus), and Bennett became
so interested that on leaving England shortly afterwards for Australia he determined
while in that country to find a solution of the question. In May 1832 he left
Plymouth on a voyage which terminated almost exactly two years later. An
account of this appeared in 1834 in two volumes under the title
Wanderings in New
South Wales, Batavia, Pedir Coast, Singapore and China. In 1835 Bennett
published in the
Transactions of the Zoological Society of London, vol. I,
pp. 229-58, "Notes on the Natural History and Habits of the Ornithorhyncus paradoxus,
Blum", one of the earliest papers of importance written on the platypus. Bennett
went to Australia again in 1836 and established a successful practice as a physician
at Sydney. He, however, kept up his general interest in science, and acted as
honorary secretary of the Australian Museum
which had just been established. He
compiled A Catalogue of the Specimens of Natural History and Miscellaneous Curiosities
deposited in the Australian
Museum
which was published in 1837. He was the first curator there from 1835 to
1841. He received his M.D. degree in Glasgow in 1859. The following year
he brought out his Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia. He kept
up a correspondence with his early friend Sir Richard Owen, to whom he had sent the
first specimens of the Nautilus to arrive in England, and also with Charles Darwin and other
scientists of the time. He was much interested in the Sydney botanic gardens
and the Acclimatization Society, and was a vice-president of the Zoological Society,
and a member of the board of the Australian Museum. In addition to the works
mentioned Bennett contributed papers to the
The Lancet, the
Medical Gazette,
the
Journal of Botany,
Loudon's Magazine of Natural History, and other
journals. The variety of his interests may be suggested by the fact that he published
in 1871 papers on "A Trip to Queensland in Search of Fossils" and on "The Introduction,
Cultivation and Economic Uses of the Orange and Others of the Citron Tribe". When
84 years of age he contributed the chapter on "Mammals" to the
Handbook of Sydney,
prepared for the Sydney meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of
Science held in 1888. In 1890 the Royal Society of New South Wales awarded Bennett
the Clarke memorial medal for his valuable contributions to the natural history of Australia.
He died in Sydney in 1893. He was married three times and left a widow and three sons.
1
Wanderings in New South Wales, Batavia,
Pedir Coast, Sumatra, and China: Being the journal of a naturalist in
those countries during 1832, 1833, and 1834
by George Bennett (1834), as an excerpt from a book review:
7. We once had an opportunity of seeing at Windsor
[sic]
a few of the dwarf
trees of China; one in particular of perhaps a foot and a half high, resembled a very
ancient elm; in the knottiness and roughness of its bark, the peculiar formation of its
arms, and in its whole growth and appearance, it might well have supposed to have seen
two centuries. It was in a tolerably sized garden pot. Mr. Bennett gives us
some account, though not so full as we could have wished
[sic]
,
of the manner in which the ingenious people of the Celestial Empire, manufacture
these Lilliputian monsters.
“The dwarf trees are certainly one of the curiosities
of the vegetable kingdom of China, being a joint production of nature and art. They
are very small, placed in pots of various kinds, upon the backs of earthenware buffaloes,
frogs, towers, and rock work, which constitute the Chinese taste in what these people
would be pleased to term ornamental gardening. The plants have all the growth and
appearance of an antiquated tree, but of an exceedingly diminutive size. Elms,
bamboos, and other trees are treated in this manner, and are abundant in the nursery
gardens about Canton and Macao. They are produced from young healthy branches,
selected from a large tree, which being decorticated and smeared with a mixture of
clay and chopped straw, as soon as they give out roots, are cut off and transplanted;
the branches are then tied in the various forms required, so as to oblige them to grow
in particular positions; and many other methods are adopted to confine and prevent the
spreading of the root. The stems, or perhaps they might rather be termed trunks,
are smeared with sugar, and holes are bored in them in which sugar is always placed,
to attract the ants, who, eating about it, give the trunk an appearance of age.
I saw at Mr. Beale's a number of dwarf trees, which have been in his possession nearly
40 years
[sic]
, and the only operation performed to keep them in that
peculiar curious state, is to clip the sprigs that may sprout out too luxuriously.
As far as gardening, or laying out of a garden is concerned, these people possess
anything but the idea of beauty or true taste, neither being in the least degree
attended to in the arrangement of their gardens. Every thing bears the semblance
of being stiff, awkward, and perfectly unnatural. To desert nature a Chinese
seems to consider the attainment of perfection.”
2
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NOTES
1
"Bennett, George," in
Dictionary of Australian Biography
by Angus and Robertson, 1949, BE-BO,
http://gutenberg.net.au/dictbiog/0-dict-biogBe-Bo.htmlt
;
"Bennett, George,"
http://www.anbg.gov.au/biography/bennett-george.html
2
"Review of New Publications,"
The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. III New Series,
April, 1835, MDCCCXXXV January to June inclusive, London, William Pickering; John
Bowyer Nichols and Son, by Sylvanus Urban, Gent.; pg.
396.
Two insights the above gives us are that, per the reviewer's introduction, "a few"
dwarf potted trees were apparently in England (at
Windsor
Castle?) by the early 1830s, and, per the quote from the book,
an Englishman named Beale while living in the Macao/Canton area for at least 40 years had in
his possession several such trees for that length of time, i.e., since the 1790s. Whether
or not Beale actually cared for the trees himself is not known, but it is unlikely.
He probably had a native gardener -- who, with what prior experience, and what experiences afterwards?
"Mr. Beale" was the merchant
prince and opium mogul Thomas Beale. Living in China since 1792, he was
among the most respected British residents in Macao, equally well known among
the Chinese and Portuguese. His life dramatically illustrates the roller-coaster
course into which many an eastern merchant fell. While still a teenager, he came
to China to join his brother's trade business. Through guts, luck, and shrewdness,
he amassed enormous wealth, only to lose it and end up in debt. Tormented and
humiliated, he disappeared from his house one day in 1841. Weeks later, a few
Portuguese boys playing on the beach were shocked to discover a decomposed body half
buried in the sand. It was Thomas Beale, who had not seen England since his
departure five decades before.
In his active years, Beale was known for his
hospitality. His mansion in Macao included a splendid garden of
twenty-five hundred plants in pots, arranged in the Chinese fashion, and an even
more famous aviary, a must-see for Western visitors to Macao. The aviary,
forty by twenty feet, contained hundreds of rare birds from China, Europe,
Southeast Asia, and South America. George Vachell, the chaplain to the
China Factory, described the sight in detail to his friend John Henslow,
Professor of Botany at Cambridge University and mentor to Charles Darwin.
There were about six hundred birds in the aviary at the time of Vachell's visit.
When the naturalist George Bennett (above) stopped in Macao during his Pacific voyage, he
was so impressed with Beale's garden and aviary that he devoted forty-five pages
of his travelogue to describing their contents. (Per Fan, Fa-ti
British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press; 2004), pp. 44-45. A
short bio on pg. 163 lists Beale's dates as c.1775-1842.)
This excerpt from Bennett thus puts
Livingstone's
report and those of
Fortune
in an entirely different light.
It would be interesting to speculate on what background the
reviewer(s) had to make the comment on Bennett's account "though not so full as we could have wished"
-- what additional details, techniques and processes might the reviewer have wanted from this early
historically-detailed-for-its-time report?
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