Charles Alexander Johns

[1]: 21  An economic crisis in 1825 forced the closure of the bank where Johns's father Henry was a working partner, throwing him out of a job and causing hardship for the family.

[1]: 16 Johns's father had encouraged his interest in natural history from an early age, and Charles had aimed for a career in the church, following an established pattern in Britain of "parson naturalists.

This led to his first completed book, Flora Sacra (1840), a volume of inspirational poetry interspersed with illustrations of dried plants with religious significance that featured in the Holy Bible.

[4] He was ordained a priest in 1842, after a period as a deacon in 1841 and took up a single post as a vicar under Bishop Henry Philpotts of Exeter in the village of Yarnscombe, near Bideford.

[4] He contributed 8% of the specimens in a hortus siccus of indigenous Cornish plants being assembled by the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society under the direction of Elizabeth Andrew Warren.

Johns is best known, however, as the author of some two dozen popular natural history books and field guides, most of which were published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

[3][4] A later book, British Birds in Their Haunts (1862), also benefited from expert illustrations, in this case engravings by Josiah Wood Whymper after drawings by the eminent Victorian animal artist Joseph Wolf.

[6] Johns's flair for description is evident in this passage from A Week at the Lizard: The launce or sand-eel is a small cylindrical fish from six to twelve inches long, which by day swims about in shoals on the sandy coast, and by night burrows in the sand, keeping near the water line.

Sometimes a Newfoundland dog accompanies the party, who with his paws fishes on his own account, never failing to seize his prize and to run off with it for security to a dry part of the beach.