Dr Henry John Carter, FRS - Blue Plaque
Dr Henry John Carter was a surgeon and a specialist in geology, paleontology and zoology.
He started working at the Devon and Exeter hospital when he was sixteen and was admitted to the College of Surgeons in 1838.
From 1859 he worked as an army surgeon in Bombay and edited a collection of geological papers on Western India, including the geology of India, which was published in 1857. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1859, and in 1872 received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society.
As a scientist he is best known as the world’s leading marine sponge expert of his time; he was praised for his work by Charles Darwin FRS; more than 20 sponges worldwide have been named after him.
Thomas Higgin, British spongiologist (1877): ‘The entire “chaotic collection of sponges” in the British Museum was sent to him to Budleigh-Salterton, where it remained for a year or two, during which time Mr. Carter examined, figured, numbered and described, in note books opened for the purpose, every single specimen, and then proceeded to arrange them in groups according to the different features presented by outward form skeletal structure, spiculation.’
Praise from Charles Darwin (1809-1882) for Carter’s research on the freshwater sponges in the tanks of Bombay: ‘None have interested me more than Carter’s on lower vegetables, infusoria, and protozoa. (…) How wonderful his account of the spermatozoa of some dioecious alga or congerva, swimming and finding the minute micropyle in a distinct plant, and forcing its way in!’
Also known as a travel writer in Arabia. The Mahrah dialect, ‘as spoken by the Mahrahs themselves is the softest and sweetest language I have ever heard’. 1848: Publication of Carter’s Vocabulary of the Mahrah dialect.
Dr Carter retired to Budleigh Salterton in 1862 where he married and had a daughter.
He died on the 4 May 1895 at the age of 81, and is buried at East Budleigh.
Reference: Wikipedia, Michael Downes
