To sketch in rapid outline and to admire to the full, John Lindley's life is not difficult even to the modern botanist whose life is passed in the cloistered calm of the laboratory; but to give a discriminating account of the chief of Lindley's services to science is well-nigh impossible for any one man: certainly I could not have undertaken it unaided. Good fortune and friends however rendered the attempt unnecessary. In the first place, Lord Lindley, when he knew of this project, put at my disposal in the kindest manner possible an outline of John Lindley's career which he had written under the title of "Sketch of my Father's Life: written for my sons, daughters and grandchildren." In what follows I have made free use of Lord Lindley's manuscript. In the second place, Mr W. Botting Hemsley has had the great kindness not only to supply me with much valuable information of which he was possessed concerning Lindley's scientific work but to examine manuscripts, letters, etc. at Kew bearing thereon and to allow me to make use of the results of his interesting investigations.
Hence my task has become merely that of an editor whose chief duty is to fit the material provided by two distinguished contributors into the prescribed space. Whatever credit is due to this first attempt to sketch the career of Lindley, belongs to these two gentlemen whose remarkable kindness I have great pleasure in acknowledging.
John Lindley was born on February 5, 1799, in Catton near Norwich. His father, George Lindley, who came of an old Yorkshire family, conducted a large nursery and fruit business in Catton. To the facts that John Lindley became in early years an accomplished field botanist and also learned much of practical horticulture may be ascribed the close touch which he maintained throughout his botanical career with the practical side of botany. It is not too much to say that John Lindley was the unique representative of a class of man which he himself declared had never existed, namely one which combined the qualities of a good physiologist with those of a practical gardener of the greatest experience. John Lindley's youthful ambition was however to be not a savant but a soldier, and though, owing to the inability of his father to buy him a commission, that ambition was not fulfilled, the instinct which prompted it found frequent expression throughout Lindley's life. As his career demonstrates, he was a first class fighting man. The curious may find in the pages of the _Gardeners' Chronicle_ records of the combats which he waged on behalf of horticulture and we shall have occasion presently to refer to the most important of all his campaigns in the cause of science.