Robert Wight

Scottish surgeon

Robert Wight MD FRS FLS (6 July 1796 – 26 May 1872) was a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company, whose professional career was spent entirely in southern India, where his greatest achievements were in botany – as an economic botanist and leading taxonomist in south India. He contributed to the introduction of American cotton. As a taxonomist he described 110 new genera and 1267 new species of flowering plants. He employed Indian botanical artists to illustrate many plants collected by himself and Indian collectors he trained. Some of these illustrations were published by William Hooker in Britain, but from 1838 he published a series of illustrated works in Madras including the uncoloured, six volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand coloured, two volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51). By the time he retired from India in 1853 he had published 2464 illustrations of Indian plants.

Wight was the son of a solicitor (Writer to the Signet) in Edinburgh who came from a line of East Lothian tenant farmers. He was born at Milton, East Lothian, the ninth of twelve siblings. He was educated at home until the age of eleven after which he studied at the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He obtained a surgeon's diploma in 1816 from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He trained at Edinburgh University, studying botany under Daniel Rutherford in 1816, and graduating MD in 1818. It has been claimed that he worked as a ship's surgeon for two years and went on a few voyages, including one to the USA

In 1819 Wight went to India as an Assistant Surgeon in the service of the East India Company, serving initially with the 21st (afterwards 42nd, which was later commanded by his brother Colonel James Wight) Madras Native Infantry. His devotion to botany was clear from the start and his earliest collections were made around Samalkota, Rajahmundry and Masulipatam in the Northern Circars in the present day state of Andhra Pradesh. After periods in the Public Cattle Depot at Mysore (Seringapatam) and with the 33rd Madras Native Infantry he was, in January 1826, appointed to succeed Dr James Shuter in the post of Madras Naturalist. and its collections (including Wight's own, and earlier ones of Patrick Russell and the Tranquebar Missionaries) were sent to the Company headquarters in London. Wight was redeployed to regimental duties as garrison surgeon at Nagapattinam.

In 1831, shortly after having been promoted to Surgeon, Wight took a three year leave to Britain ‘on private affairs’. He took with him to London 100,000 plant specimens representing 3000 4000 species, and weighing 2 tons.

Wight returned to India in 1834 as a full surgeon in the 33rd Regiment of Native Infantry at Bellary. During this period he began working on the medicinal plants of India, maintaining native botanical artists and publishing brief notes in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science and later became the editor for the botany section of that journal. The papers included one on the medicinal plant ‘mudar’ (Calotropis procera) and on the flora of Courtallam.

The recognition of Wight's botanical skills led in 1836 to his transfer to the Madras Revenue Department. The transfer was based on references from Hooker and Robert Brown, the Governor Sir Frederick Adam advised by J. G. Malcolmson, and Wight was to report on agriculture and cotton. Over the next six years this work involved species such as tea, sugar cane, senna and, increasingly, cotton. In 1836 he visited Ceylon for six weeks, and he reported on the resources of upland areas including the Palni Hills. In 1841 he purchased a house in Ootacamund, which was to remain the base for his growing family until 1847. In 1842 he was appointed Superintendent of American Cotton Plantations, a post in Coimbatore that he held until his retirement in 1853. and long staple cottons did not supersede indigenous diploid varieties until the early 20th century. Wight was an early member of the Madras Agri Horticultural Society, whose garden, next to the Cathedral in Madras, acted as the city's botanical garden. He acted as the Society's secretary at various times between 1839 and 1841, and edited a volume of its Proceedings in 1842. In India Wight published numerous letters and short papers in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science (1834–40), in the various publications of the Calcutta based Agricultural and Society of India (1838–54) and the Calcutta Journal of Natural History (1845–6).

Wight's lasting achievement was the series of illustrated publications on Indian botany. Learning from Roxburgh, who had used expensive engravings, Wight decided to use cheaper lithographic techniques. He began to employ the artist Rungiah (Rungia), who was employed from possibly as early as 1826 to around 1845, and thereafter employed Govindoo. Unlike other British workers of the time, he gave credit to his artists, printing their names on all his publications of their drawings. He named a genus of orchid, Govindooia (now Tropidia), after Govindoo, but could not do so for Rungiah, as a genus Rungia already existed, described by Nathaniel Wallich for an Indian plant named after the German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge (1794 1867). Wights illustrated publications included the uncoloured, six volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand coloured, two volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51).

Wight left India after retiring from service in March 1853. He returned to England with poor health and difficulty in hearing. He returned to England and bought the 66 acre estate of Grazeley Lodge near Reading. Although his intention had been to continue with taxonomic research, he got diverted into small scale agriculture, and published very little thereafter. Eight short articles on cotton cultivation were published in the Gardeners' Chronicle in 1861 and as a substantial pamphlet in 1862. In 1865 Wight was a member of the committee that helped Edward John Waring edit the Pharmacopoeia of India (published in 1868) and in 1866 he read a paper on On the Phenomenon of Vegetation in the Indian Spring to the International Botanical Congress in London. Visiting botanists were welcomed to use his herbarium, but a new generation of botanists had become active in India, including Joseph Hooker and Thomas Thomson. He donated his vast collection of duplicates to the Kew herbarium, which included 3108 species of higher plants and 94 of ferns, distributed in 1869/70 in 20 sets to herbaria in Europe, Russia, North America, South Africa, Australia and, for the first time, to two South Asian herbaria (Calcutta and Peradeniya). In October 1871, shortly before his death Wight gave his best specimens to Kew, which included the types of the species described in his publications. Unlike some of his other medical contemporaries Wight was not successful financially, he left moveable estate worth less than £2000 (about £200,000 in today's terms), and Grazeley had to be sold immediately after his death. Descendants of the daughter of his eldest son James survive although they do not bear his surname.

Noltie, H. J. (2007) Robert Wight and the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah and Govindoo. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The Life and Work of Robert Wight. (Book 1)
Botanical Drawings by Rungiah & Govindoo: the Wight Collection. (Book 2)
Journeys in Search of Robert Wight (Book 3). Noltie, H. J. (2005a) Robert Wight and the Illustration of Indian Botany. The Hooker Lecture. The Linnean. Special Issue No 6.

Curtis' Botanical Magazine. 1931. Dedications and Portraits 1827 1927. Compiled by Earnest Nelmes and Wm. Cuthbertson. London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd.

Gray, Asa. 1873. Scientific Intelligence. American Journal of Science and Arts 5, ser. 3. p. 395. King, Sir George. 1899. The Early History of Indian botany. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. pp. 904–919.