A few years ago, Tim Hammer realized suddenly that his research was haunted by a very unpleasant ghost. Hammer is a botanist. He was just beginning a postdoctoral position at the University of Adelaide, working on the taxonomy of Hibbertia, a genus of plants commonly known as guinea flowers. Hammer found that the genus was even more diverse than scientists had previously understood, and soon he was working on descriptions of dozens of new species.
Hammer began to wonder about the genus’s namesake, an Englishman named George Hibbert. Botanical texts described him as a “patron of botany.” But he was more than that, Hammer learned. Hibbert, who died in 1837, was a slave owner and, as a member of the British Parliament, a leading opponent of abolition. Hammer thought it was unseemly that an enslaver’s name would still be…
Read the full article originally published at e360.yale.edu.