Alexander Goodman More

Born in 1830, he became known as an Irish naturalist, botanist, and ornithologist whose work centered on the wildlife and plant life of Ireland. He collaborated with David Moore on Contributions towards a Cybele Hibernica, an important record of the distribution of Irish plants.

More also wrote on birds and natural history more broadly, and his reputation was strong enough that a memorial volume, Life and letters of Alexander Goodman More, was published after his death in 1895. His career is remembered for patient fieldwork and for turning close local study into useful scientific record.

Although not a household name today, he played a meaningful part in nineteenth-century Irish natural history. Readers interested in botany, birds, and the history of science may find his life especially appealing because it shows how much careful observation could achieve before modern field technology.