Abstract
WILLIAM TURNER THISELTON-DYER, son of Dr. W. G. Thiselton Dyer, was born in Westminster on July 28, 1843. At King's College School, where his contemporaries included Prof. Saintsbury and the late Dr. Henry Trimen, Dyer was first mathematical scholar: as schoolboys Trimen and he were companions on botanical excursions near London. Matriculating in the University of London, Dyer entered King's College, meaning, like Trimen, to study medicine: in Dyer's case the intention only went far enough to qualify him for eventual admission to the Society of Apothecaries as a ‘member by apprenticeship.’ At King's College his contemporaries included Sir Charles Lyall, whose participation in Dyer's botanical pursuits made them companions in a vacation walking tour, and provided Lyall in after life with relaxation from the tasks of an Indian official and the studies of an Oriental scholar. This friendship, and the fact that relatives of his father were resident in Madras, while his maternal uncle, T. A. C. Firm-inger, author of the classic “Manual of Gardening in India,” was a chaplain in Bengal, may have induced the idea of an Indian career under which Dyer, at twenty, went up to Christ Church, Oxford, as a Junior Student whose mathematical aptitude and classical proficiency had left unimpaired his early botanical interests.
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SIR W. T. THISELTON-DYER, K.C.M.G. Nature 123, 212–214 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/123212a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/123212a0