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Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
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Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (12 July 1825 – 12 November 1914) was an English botanist and mycologist who was, at various points, a London schoolteacher, a Kew mycologist, curator at the India Museum, journalist and author. Cooke was the elder brother of the art-education reformer Ebenezer Cooke (1837–1913) and father of the book illustrator and watercolour painter William Cubitt Cooke (1866–1951).
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke was born on 12 July 1825 at the village shop and post office in Horning, Norfolk to Mary (née Cubitt) (1803–1885), postmistress and village herbalist, and Mordecai Cooke (1799–1869), village shopkeeper. His maternal grandfather was William Cubitt, who was schoolmaster in Neatishead, Norfolk. Cooke was the eldest of eight children and initially attended the village dame-school.
Between the age of ten and thirteen he was taught by his uncle, James Cubitt, a Baptist minister, in Ilford then Stratford upon Avon. He then attended a commercial school at Neatishead for a year before taking up a five year apprenticeship with a wholesale draper in Norwich.
In 1844, Cooke moved to London to be a clerk in a law firm, but his chief interest was botany. His aunt Naomi Treen (née Cubitt), a teacher at a Pestalozzian primary school encouraged him to take up teaching. He taught natural history at Holy Trinity National School, Lambeth from 1851, where he set up a school museum and pioneered new natural history teaching methods. He wrote for School and the Teacher magazine and helped to found a museum for London teachers. In 1859 he earned a first class in botany in the first examination for teachers run by the Department of Science and Art. He left teaching after this, around the same time that his first child with his step daughter was born. He worked part time roles and published books before working as a curator at the India Museum at India Office from 1862 - 1880. He founded the Society of Amateur Botanists in 1862.
In 1879, when the botanical materials in the India Museum were moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cooke went with them. He received a Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1902 and a Linnean Medal from the Linnean Society of London in 1903. He claimed to have gained several honorary diplomas for his work, mainly with fungi: MAs from St. Lawrence University in 1870 and Yale University in 1873, and a doctorate from New York University though these claims are disputed. Cooke's life and work are comprehensively documented in a biography by distant relative Mary P. English.
Cooke joined Edward Step (1855–1931) in publishing the magazine Hardwicke's Science-Gossip: A Monthly Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature from 1865 to 1893. From 1870 to 1890 he edited several exsiccatae and exsiccata-like works, one of them the series Fungi Britannici exsiccati a M. C. Cooke collecti, Series I starting with 1865 and another Fungi Americani exsiccati (1878-1882) with Henry William Ravenel.
From 1872 to 1894 Cooke also edited Grevillea, a monthly record of cryptogamic botany and its literature, a periodical devoted to mycology. He was a founder of the Quekett Microscopical Club in 1865, in response to a request in Science-Gossip, and a founding member of the British Mycological Society.
It has been suggested that Cooke's description of the perceived distortions of the size of objects while intoxicated by the fungus Amanita muscaria (commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita), in his books The Seven Sisters of Sleep and A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi, inspired the passage in Lewis Carroll's 1865 popular children's storybook Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice grows or shrinks on eating parts of the mushroom. (The effects were later termed Alice in Wonderland syndrome.)
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Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (12 July 1825 – 12 November 1914) was an English botanist and mycologist who was, at various points, a London schoolteacher, a Kew mycologist, curator at the India Museum, journalist and author. Cooke was the elder brother of the art-education reformer Ebenezer Cooke (1837–1913) and father of the book illustrator and watercolour painter William Cubitt Cooke (1866–1951).
Mordecai Cubitt Cooke was born on 12 July 1825 at the village shop and post office in Horning, Norfolk to Mary (née Cubitt) (1803–1885), postmistress and village herbalist, and Mordecai Cooke (1799–1869), village shopkeeper. His maternal grandfather was William Cubitt, who was schoolmaster in Neatishead, Norfolk. Cooke was the eldest of eight children and initially attended the village dame-school.
Between the age of ten and thirteen he was taught by his uncle, James Cubitt, a Baptist minister, in Ilford then Stratford upon Avon. He then attended a commercial school at Neatishead for a year before taking up a five year apprenticeship with a wholesale draper in Norwich.
In 1844, Cooke moved to London to be a clerk in a law firm, but his chief interest was botany. His aunt Naomi Treen (née Cubitt), a teacher at a Pestalozzian primary school encouraged him to take up teaching. He taught natural history at Holy Trinity National School, Lambeth from 1851, where he set up a school museum and pioneered new natural history teaching methods. He wrote for School and the Teacher magazine and helped to found a museum for London teachers. In 1859 he earned a first class in botany in the first examination for teachers run by the Department of Science and Art. He left teaching after this, around the same time that his first child with his step daughter was born. He worked part time roles and published books before working as a curator at the India Museum at India Office from 1862 - 1880. He founded the Society of Amateur Botanists in 1862.
In 1879, when the botanical materials in the India Museum were moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cooke went with them. He received a Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1902 and a Linnean Medal from the Linnean Society of London in 1903. He claimed to have gained several honorary diplomas for his work, mainly with fungi: MAs from St. Lawrence University in 1870 and Yale University in 1873, and a doctorate from New York University though these claims are disputed. Cooke's life and work are comprehensively documented in a biography by distant relative Mary P. English.
Cooke joined Edward Step (1855–1931) in publishing the magazine Hardwicke's Science-Gossip: A Monthly Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature from 1865 to 1893. From 1870 to 1890 he edited several exsiccatae and exsiccata-like works, one of them the series Fungi Britannici exsiccati a M. C. Cooke collecti, Series I starting with 1865 and another Fungi Americani exsiccati (1878-1882) with Henry William Ravenel.
From 1872 to 1894 Cooke also edited Grevillea, a monthly record of cryptogamic botany and its literature, a periodical devoted to mycology. He was a founder of the Quekett Microscopical Club in 1865, in response to a request in Science-Gossip, and a founding member of the British Mycological Society.
It has been suggested that Cooke's description of the perceived distortions of the size of objects while intoxicated by the fungus Amanita muscaria (commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita), in his books The Seven Sisters of Sleep and A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi, inspired the passage in Lewis Carroll's 1865 popular children's storybook Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice grows or shrinks on eating parts of the mushroom. (The effects were later termed Alice in Wonderland syndrome.)
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