William Jack's Letters to Nathaniel Wallich, 1819-1821.
copied for the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. from the Records of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Calcutta, by kind permission, under the superintendence of Major A. T. Gage, edited, with a list of the plants known to have been collected by Jack, and with notes by I. H. Burkill.
Sir Stamford Raffles, in 1817, when on leave in England, was appointed by the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company to the post of Lieutenant-Governor of the decaying settlement of Bencoolen in Sumatra; and he sailed from Portsmouth to take up his new duties. He had attached to his staff the naturalist Joseph Arnold, whose name is so aptly associated with his own in Rafflesia Arnoldi,—that of the parasite with the gigantic flower, which they discovered together on a journey into the interior of Sumatra (May 20th, 1818). Soon after this, perhaps from the fatigues of this very journey, Arnold died (vide Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, London 1830, p. 365).
Affairs so fell that after Arnold's death Raffles had to revisit Calcutta, and when there he got together a staff of naturalists. This is how he alludes to them in a letter dated Nov. 26th, 1818 to the Duchess of Somerset "I take down from hence a medical man of the name of Jack, who will be entrusted with the botanical part of my researches: and I have two Frenchmen, M. Diard and M. Duvaucel, the former the pupil and the later the step-son of Cuvier....... These three savans with a missionary clergyman, who takes charge of a printing press, form my equipment from Calcutta, so that I hope we may do something."
William Jack, who has thus been introduced to the reader, was the eldest son of the Rev. William Jack, and his wife Grace Bouli.
Of the father, Dr. J. W. H. Traill, Professor of Botany in the University of Aberdeen, has been so good as to supply the following information. He had the degrees of M.A. and M.D, and was chosen to be Professor of Mathematics in King's College, Aberdeen in 1794. This chair he held until 1811 when he exchanged it for that of Moral Philosophy. In 1815 he was elected to the post of Principal, and held it until his death at a great age in 1854.
The son's career is given in Hooker's Companion to the Botanical Magazine, i. 1835, p. 120, from the pen of his mother:
