42
ESSEX WORTHIES.
II.—EZEKIEL GEORGE VARENNE, OF KELVEDON.
By PROF. G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S.
[Read, December 30th, 1890.]
BOTANY in England owes more perhaps of its many-sided pro-
gress to the unostentatious labours of those enthusiastic students
of Nature who have appeared but little in print than to its most volu-
minous expositors. Among such enthusiasts Essex has benefited by
the work of Samuel Dale, Edward Forster, William Williamson New-
bould and Ezekiel George Varenne. Mr. Varenne was of Huguenot
descent, and his father being resident medical officer of Marylebone
Infirmary it happened to be in that building that the future botanist
was born, May 6th, 1811. He received his medical training at
Westminster Hospital and at his father's Infirmary and became in
1832 a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries and in the following
year a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1832 he was
appointed surgeon to the Nottingham Cholera Board of Health and
he seems to have settled in practice at Kelvedon about 1847. Here
he passed the remainder of his life, retiring from practice some time
before his death, which was preceded by an illness of two years'
duration. He died April 22nd, 1887, aged seventy-five years, and
was buried in the churchyard of the parish. He was a scholar and a
linguist as well as a naturalist, widely read and most careful in
observation. In botany he may well have received part of his
training, if not his first stimulus, from William Frederick Goodger,
resident apothecary to the Marylebone Infirmary from 1811 to 1832,
and Richard Rozea, a surgeon practising in the same parish about
the same time. The herbarium formed by these two gentlemen in
the London district between 1815 and 1823 was presented to Mr.
Varenne about 1862,1 Though in this his favourite recreation he
worked largely at the Cryptogamia, especially mosses and lichens,
he also did good service among flowering plants. He seems to have
taken that special interest in "critical" species that marks the
thorough botanist. He collected Rubi,2 Carices, Potamogetons, and
species of Rosa, Chenopodium and Chara ; whilst his papers, mainly
1 Trimen and Dyer, "Flora of Middlesex," p. 398.
2 Gibson, "Flora of Essex," p. 98.