John Forbes Royle

John Forbes Royle (10 May 1798 – 2 January 1858), British botanist and teacher of materia medica (pharmacology), was born in Kanpur (then Cawnpore) in India in 1798.

[2][3] In 1823 Royle was appointed as Superintendent of the botanical garden at Saharanpur which had been established by the East India Company in 1750 with the aim of promoting the introduction of new crops of commercial value.

[2] Royle succeeded John Ayrton Paris in 1836 as professor of materia medica at King's College London, a position he held till 1856.

[citation needed] The work on which Royle's reputation chiefly rests is the Illustrations of the Botany and other branches of Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains, and of the Flora of Cashmere, in 2 vols.

Royle suggested the idea of state protection for forests in his Essay on the Productive Resources of India (1840).

They had a daughter Annette Jane and sons Joseph Ralph Edward John, William Henry Lough and Edmund Elphinstone.