University Botany in Colonial Victoria: Frederick McCoy's Botanical Classes and Collections at the University of Melbourne

Abstract

Botany was part of the broad intellectual territory of one of the University of Melbourne's four foundation chairs. From his appointment in 1854 until his death in 1899, Frederick McCoy was the Professor of Natural Science and, for most of that time, also honorary Director of the Colony of Victoria's National Museum. McCoy gained ideas about botany and botanic gardens and museums while studying and working at the University of Cambridge, where he attended Professor John Stevens Henslow's botany lectures in 1847. With help from Henslow and Victoria's Government Botanist, Ferdinand Mueller, McCoy acquired botanical collections and developed a class (system) garden at the University of Melbourne, where he taught botany to arts and medical students from 1863 until the establishment of the science degree and arrival of the Professor of Biology in 1887 left him only a rarely-taken botanical subject.