Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Dubois, Charles

1171722Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 16 — Dubois, Charles1888Benjamin Daydon Jackson

DUBOIS, CHARLES (d. 1740), treasurer to the East India Company, lived at Mitcham, Surrey, where he had a garden filled with the newest exotics at that time in course of introduction. As regards botany, he seems to have been chiefly a patron rather than a worker; thus he appears as one of twelve English subscribers to Micheli's ‘Nova Genera,’ 1728. His name, however, occurs as having contributed observations to the third edition of Ray's ‘Synopsis,’ 1724. His dried plants occupy seventy-four folio volumes, the entire number of specimens being about thirteen thousand, and are in excellent preservation; they form part of the herbarium at the Oxford Botanic Garden. He died 21 Oct. 1740. Brown established his genus Duboisia in commemoration.

[Gent. Mag. (1740), x. 525; Nichols's Lit. Illustr., i. 366–76 (mentioned in letters); Daubeny's Oxford Bot. Garden, p. 49.]

B. D. J.