George Caley was a botanist who pioneered studies of Australia’s flora
between 1800 and 1810. He is now mainly remembered as the leader of a failed
expedition into the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Joan Webb’s biography,
George Caley: 19th Century Naturalist (Surrey Beatty & Sons, A$37.95,
ISBN 0 949324 62 0), attempts to restore his reputation. She says Caley’s
eccentricity contributed to this lack of recognition—he was so preoccupied
with cataloguing and preserving his specimens that he never published any
results.
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