Alexander Garden (naturalist)

He collected and studied flora and fauna and parcelled them up to send to John Ellis, a merchant and zoologist in London, and to Carl Linnaeus in Sweden, after discovering linnaean classification in 1754.

There were no neighbours with similar interests – "there is not a living soul who knows the least iota of Natural History," he wrote to Ellis[5] – and his botanical and zoological conversations were carried on by correspondence.

His parcels to Europe included "birds, fish, reptiles, amphibia, insects, and plants"[2] from South Carolina or further afield, some from new species or genera which were then described in the scientific literature.

His zoological interests led Garden to write about cochineal insects and about the Greater Siren, (Sirena lacertina), once called the mud iguana.

[8] As a doctor, he used his scientific knowledge in the smallpox epidemic in Charleston in 1760 when he inoculated over 2000 people, and he published an essay on the medicinal properties of the pinkroot (Spigelia marilandica).