Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 53.djvu/219

 dated 1784. Solander's name has also been given to two small islands—one in the Mergui Archipelago, and the other south of New Zealand.

Solander published nothing independently. There is a paper by him on Gardenia in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (vol. lii.). In addition to editing Linné's ‘Elementa Botanica,’ as already stated, he described the fossils in Gustavus Brander's ‘Fossilia Hantoniensia’ (1766, 4to), and arranged and described the material for John Ellis's ‘Natural History of Zoophytes’ (1786, 4to). Sir James Edward Smith says of him (loc. cit.) that he ‘reduced our garden plants to order, and laid the foundation of the “Hortus Kewensis” of his friend Aiton; but that “abstract principles of classification seem never to have attracted him.”’ His death prevented the publication of the descriptions of the plants collected on the voyage of the Endeavour. Twenty volumes of manuscript (eight in folio and twelve in quarto) are, however, preserved in the botanical department of the British Museum, systematically recording the plants collected in the various countries visited. A useful form of bookbox portfolio designed by him is still known as a Solander case.

[Life, by B. D. Jackson, in Journal of Sir Joseph Banks, 1896; Chalmers's Biogr. Dict.; Rees's Cyclopædia; works cited above.]

 SOLANUS, MOSES, or (d. 1735?), Greek scholar, was grandson of Paul du Soul of Tours, who was professor of theology and rector of the academy at Saumur between 1657 and 1661. As a protestant he was driven from France by persecution, and seems to have settled at Amsterdam, whence he came to England. His fine Greek scholarship recommended him to the notice of men of influence at both Oxford and Cambridge. Encouraged by Dr. Bentley, he projected an edition of Lucian, of which in 1708 he printed a specimen at Cambridge, and he collected materials for a life of that writer. Nothing came of this ‘famous and accurate’ edition. In the same year he was employed in the family of the Earl of Wharton (, Collections, ii. 102). In 1722 and 1723 he was at The Hague, whither, Professor Mayor conjectures, ‘he may have gone to negotiate with the Wetsteins.’ In conjunction with Brutel de la Rivière, he translated Prideaux's ‘Connection’ into French, as ‘Histoire des Juifs et des peuples voisins’ (Amsterdam, 1722). Returning to England, he completed a splendid edition of Plutarch's ‘Lives’ (5 vols. London, 1729), which had been commenced by Augustine Bryan [q. v.] and which Thomas Bentley, LL.D. [q. v.], had, in the first instance, proposed to continue. A passage in the preface (p. xi) of Reitz's edition of ‘Lucian’ shows that he was living after 1733. He appears to have died before 1737.

[Haag's La France Protestante, vol. iv.; Paper by Professor J. E. B. Mayor in Cambr. Antiq. Soc. Commun. vol. v.]

 SOLE, WILLIAM (1741–1802), botanist, born at Thetford in the Isle of Ely in 1741, was the eldest son of John Sole by his wife Martha, daughter of John Rayner, banker, of Ely. The family, which derived its name (perpetuated in Sole Street, near Rochester) from Soules, near St. Lo in Normandy, was settled in East Kent during the reign of Richard I, and held the manor of Soles in the parish of Nonnington in that of Edward I. William Sole, grandson of John Sole, mayor of Faversham in 1444 (who raised a company of pikes against Jack Cade and received the thanks of the privy council), settled in the Isle of Ely about 1510, and was the ancestor of the botanist. The wife of another descendant, Joan Sole of Horton, was martyred at Canterbury on 31 Jan. 1556, and there are copper tokens struck by John Sole of Battersea in 1668.

The future botanist was educated at the King's School, Ely, and then apprenticed to a Dr. Cory of Cambridge. He afterwards accompanied his relative, Christopher Anstey [q. v.], the poet, to Bath, where he practised as a surgeon. On the foundation of the Linnean Society, in 1788, Sole was chosen one of its first associates, and carried on a long correspondence with John Pitchford of Norwich, the early friend of Sir James Edward Smith [q. v.], on the subject of mints. He drew up a manuscript flora of Bath in 1782. In 1798 he published his chief botanical work, ‘Menthæ Britannicæ,’ a folio of fifty-four pages, illustrated by twenty-four copper-plates, the critical accuracy of which is evidenced by the fact that several British mints still bear the names assigned to them by Sole. He also prepared an account of the principal English grasses and their agricultural uses, with specimens, which he presented to the Bath and West of England Agricultural Society in 1799, and the society presented him with a silver tankard. He died unmarried at Trim Street, Bath, on 7 Feb. 1802, and was buried at Bath-Easton. Sprengel commemorated him by the genus Solea, now merged in Viola. A miniature of him by Ford is in the possession of his great-nephew, the Rev. A. Baron Sole of Winchester.

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