page_title: James Rodway
section_title: Work as a botanist
hierarchical_section_title: James Rodway / Career / Work as a botanist
caption_attribution_description: English: Hardback cover of the T.Fisher Unwin published 'In The Guiana Forest' by James Rodway.
context_page_description: James Rodway was an eminent British-born Guyanese historian, botanist and novelist. Widely credited as Guyana's premier historian, Rodway helped to establish national institutions such as the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana and the British Guiana Museum. A fellow of the Linnean Society, in later years he served as Editor of the colony's literary and scientific journal, Timehri.
  Rodway is the namesake of both a sub-species of Violaceous Euphonia - Euphonia Violacea Rodwayi, as named by Thomas Edward Penard - and the Gold Tetra, or Hemigrammus Rodwayi, named by Marion Durbin Ellis.
  A History of British Guiana, from 1668 to the Present Time, Guiana: British, Dutch and French and Hand-book of British Guiana are considered some of Rodway's major works.
context_section_description: Following his arrival in the capital city of Georgetown, James Rodway – as he was now known – worked four years for Joseph Kleine & Co. before becoming manager of a pharmacy. Alongside reading the few history books available on the colony, the works of Henry G. Dalton and George Hanneman Bennett, in order to better acquaint himself with his new home Rodway continued to cultivate the avid interest in botany that had begun back in England as a child. He now read much of what existed on the flora and fauna of British Guiana and the Americas. Along with this came the wider personal study of insects, fish, topography and more. In any time he was able to do so, Rodway took the opportunity to walk many miles to record local plant and animal life extensively; as early as 1871, he began the first of his frequent boat trips along rivers and creeks to the Guyanese interior where he would come into contact with both the native and the Boviander populations. These journeys, with Rodway's detailed journaling of his discoveries and observations along their course, were to later inform much of his written works. The keen botanist steadily amassed an extensive herbarium, all the contents of which were self-described. Meanwhile, Rodway became known for his development of various orchids and ferns in the greenhouse of the Georgetown home he purchased in 1880, and won first prize at a flower exhibition held in the city's Botanical Gardens. 
  Rodway was eventually approached by both James Thomson, Editor of The Argosy newspaper and Everard im Thurn, founder and first Editor of Timehri magazine – established in 1882 as the official publication of the nation's Royal Agricultural & Commercial Society. Thomson and Thurn encouraged him to put his acquired knowledge to wider use writing articles and studies for the respective institutions specific to the colony's wildlife as well its rural and Amazon-based communities. Until his death, almost no subsequent issue of Timehri would be published without one or more of Rodway's articles.
  By the 1890s, Rodway was an established name in British Guiana in the field of botany. 'The Struggle for Life in the Forest' would be the article to establish Rodway in the wider world beyond the colony. Published in 1891 for Timehri and again for the Smithsonian Institution, it was highly remarked upon by W.T. Stead, in the Review of Reviews. That same year, on 17 December, Rodway was elected as fellow of the Linnean Society of London. These developments encouraged Rodway to propose a book to the London-based publishing company T. Fisher Unwin – one that would be devised primarily from his previous botanical articles. In the Guiana Forest – Studies of Nature in Relation to the Struggle for Life was subsequently published in 1894. With the positive reception to this book, Rodway established himself as an authority on the subject of British Guiana – in particular across the English-speaking world – even being referenced by the philosopher Herbert Spencer in his material. Throughout his life, as with his historical work, Rodway's writing featured in newspapers, journals and magazines from England to Australia.
caption: Hardback cover of Rodway's In The Guiana Forest, published by T. Fisher Unwin
exif: {}