James Hector: Explorer, scientist, leader

JAMES HECTOR by Simon Nathan

 ISBN:              9781877480461

RRP:                            $45.00

Format:         Paperback

Imprint:         Geoscience Society of New Zealand

Distr:              Potton & Burton

Did you know one man was behind the Colonial Museum (now Te Papa), standardising New Zealand time, introducing conifers such as radiata pine and macrocarpa to New Zealand, starting a national earthquake-recording system, the forerunner of today’s GeoNet, and was one of the first observers to report on the disastrous 1886 Tarawera eruption?

James Hector’s (1834 -1907) many achievements include setting up the Colonial Museum (now Te Papa), standardising New Zealand time, and introducing conifers such as radiata pine and macrocarpa to New Zealand. Although employed as a geologist, James Hector developed a special interest in the whales and dolphins of the New Zealand region, building up a collection of skeletons in the Colonial Museum. In the 21st century his name is particularly associated with Hector’s dolphin, Cephalorhynchus hectori, an endangered local species that he was the first to describe in 1873 as Electra clancula. Subsequently it was renamed after Hector by Professor W.H. Flower of the British Museum.

James Hector was the dominant personality in the small nineteenth-century scientific community in New Zealand and was the first scientist employed by the government. A trusted advisor, whenever a tricky technical problem arose, the first question was often, ‘What does Dr Hector think?’

James Hector: Explorer, scientist, leader describes the life and work of this multi-talented man and the organisations he founded. It is aimed at the general reader with an interest in New Zealand’s history and natural environment, and is generously illustrated.

About the author:

Simon Nathan is a geologist and science historian who has worked in many parts of New Zealand. Much of his career has been at GNS Science, the successor to the New Zealand Geological Survey founded by James Hector in 1865, and he has also been science editor at Te Ara, the online Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. As well as technical publications, he has written biographies of Harold Wellman (the man who discovered the Alpine Fault) and J Joseph Divis (mining town photographer).