# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wade, Walter

​WADE, WALTER (d. 1825), Irish botanist, was a physician practising in Dublin in 1790. Aylmer Bourke Lambert [q. v.] in a letter to (Sir) James Edward Smith [q. v.] states that through Wade's exertions a grant of 300l. was obtained to establish the botanic garden at Dublin, and that he intended publishing a work entitled ‘Flora Dublinensis’ (Memoir and Correspondence of Sir James Edward Smith, ii. 126–7). Undated folio sheets of this proposed work exist, with plates, under the title ‘Floræ Dublinensis Specimen,’ but it was never carried out. In 1794 Wade published ‘Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum indigenarum in comitatu Dublinensi … pars prima,’ on the title-page of which he describes himself as M.D., licentiate of the King's and Queen's College of Physicians, and lecturer on botany. This work is in Latin (275 pages 8vo), arranged on the Linnæan system, with carefully verified localities and indexes of the Latin, English, and Irish names, the sedges and cryptogamic plants being reserved for a second part, which was never published. Lady Kane, in her anonymous ‘Irish Flora’ (Dublin, 1833, 12mo), says of this work (preface, p. vii) that it was ‘the first that appeared in Ireland under a systematic arrangement,’ and that its author ‘may be justly considered as the first who diffused a general taste for botany in this country.’ Wade visited various parts of Ireland in search of plants: in 1796 ​and 1805 he was in Kerry (ib. ii. 160), and in 1801 in Connemara, ‘a district … never examined by any botanist before’ (ib. p. 148), where he was the first to find the pipewort (Eriocaulon) in Ireland. In 1802 he issued a full ‘Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Botany’ (Dublin, pp. 50, 8vo), on the title-page of which he is described as ‘professor and lecturer on botany to the Right Honourable and Honourable the Dublin Society.’ This syllabus is largely historical, and refers to the arrangement of the Glasnevin botanical garden. Wade's second work of importance, however, was ‘Plantæ rariores in Hibernia inventæ’ (Dublin, 1804, pp. 214, 8vo), an English work, reprinted from the ‘Transactions of the Dublin Society’ (1803, vol. iv.). About this time Wade was awarded a prize of 5l. by the Dublin Society for the discovery of mosses new to Ireland (Loudon, Magazine of Natural History, 1829, ii. 305); and on the title of his ‘Sketch of Lectures on Meadow and Pasture Grasses delivered in the Dublin Society's Botanical Garden Glasnevin’ (Dublin, 1808, pp. 55, 8vo), he is described as physician to the Dublin General Dispensary and lecturer on botany to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In 1811 he published, ‘Salices, or an Essay towards a General History of Willows’ (Dublin, 8vo), his chief remaining independent work. Wade died in Dublin in 1825. He had been elected an associate of the Linnean Society in 1792. Besides the works already mentioned, he published ‘Sketch of Lectures on Artificial or Sown Grasses’ (Dublin, 1808, pp. 51, 8vo), catalogues of the Glasnevin garden, and several papers in the Dublin Society's ‘Transactions’ (vols. ii–vi.), of which the most important are on Buddlea globosa, Holcus odoratus, and ‘Oaks,’ the latter in the main a translation from Michaux's ‘Chênes de l'Amérique septentrionale’ (Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers, vi. 221). He also projected a work entitled ‘Flora Hibernica’ which never appeared.
G. S. B.