Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (12 July 1825, in Horning, Norfolk – 12 November 1914, in Southsea, Hampshire) was an English botanist and mycologist who was, at various points, a London schoolteacher, a Kew mycologist, curator at the India Museum, journalist and author.[1][2][3] Cooke was the elder brother of the art-education reformer Ebenezer Cooke (1837–1913) and father of the book illustrator and watercolour painter William Cubitt Cooke (1866–1951).[4]
Cooke, from a mercantile family in Horning, Norfolk, was apprenticed to a fabric merchant before becoming a clerk in a law firm, but his chief interest was botany. He founded the Society of Amateur Botanists in 1862 while teaching natural history at Holy Trinity National School, Lambeth, and working as a curator at the India MuseumatIndia Office from 1860. In 1879, when the botanical materials in the India Museum were moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cooke went with them. He received a Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1902 and a Linnean Medal from the Linnean Society of London in 1903. He claimed to have gained several honorary diplomas for his work, mainly with fungi: MAs from St. Lawrence University in 1870 and Yale University in 1873, and a doctorate from New York University though these claims are disputed. Cooke's life and work are comprehensively documented in a biography by distant relative Mary P. English.[1]
Cooke joined Edward Step (1855–1931) in publishing the magazine Hardwicke's Science-Gossip: A Monthly Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature from 1865 to 1893. From 1870 to 1890 he edited seven exsiccatae[5], one of them the series Fungi Americani exsiccati with Henry William Ravenel.[6] From 1872 to 1894 Cooke also edited Grevillea, a monthly record of cryptogamic botany and its literature, a periodical devoted to mycology. He was a founder of the Quekett Microscopical Club in 1865, in response to a request in Science-Gossip, and a founding member of the British Mycological Society.
It has been suggested that Cooke's description of the perceived distortions of the size of objects while intoxicated by the fungus Amanita muscaria (commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita), in his books The Seven Sisters of Sleep and A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi, inspired the passage in Lewis Carroll's 1865 popular children's storybook Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice grows or shrinks on eating parts of the mushroom.[7][8] (The effects were later termed Alice in Wonderland syndrome.)
He is honoured in the naming of Cookeina, which is a genus of cup fungi in the family Sarcoscyphaceae, which was found in 1891.[9]
A Manual of Structural Botany: for the use of classes, schools, & private students... with upwards of 200 illustrations by Ruffle (Robert Hardwicke, London, 1861, new edition 1877)
A Manual of Botanic Terms... with illustrations (Robert Hardwicke, London, 1862, new edition 1873)
Handbook of British Fungi, with full descriptions of all the species and illustrations of the genera (2 vols, Macmillan & Co., London/New York, 1871, new edition 1883)
Report on the Gums, Resins, Oleo-Resins, and Resinous Products in the India Museum, or produced in India. Prepared under the direction of the Reporter on the Products of India (London, 1874)
Report on the Oil Seeds and Oils in the India Museum, or produced in India. Prepared under the direction of the Reporter on the Products of India (London, 1876)
The Myxomycetes of Great Britain, translated from the Polish of J. T. Rostafinski (London, 1877)
Clavis Synoptica Hymenomycetum Europaeorum, with L. Quelet (London, 1878)
The Woodlands (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1879)
Mycographia, seu Icones fungorum. Figures of fungi from all parts of the world, drawn and illustrated by M. C. Cooke (Williams & Norgate, London, 1875 and 1879)
Ponds and Ditches (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1880)
Vegetable Wasps and Plant Worms. A popular history of entomogeneous fungi or fungi parasitic upon insects... with... illustrations (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1892)
Romance of Low Life amongst Plants. Facts and phenomena of cryptogamic vegetation (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1893)
Handbook of British Hepaticae, etc. (W. H. Allen & Co., London, 1894)
Introduction to the Study of Fungi: their organography, classification, and distribution. For the use of collectors (Adam & Charles Black, London, 1895)
Object-Lesson Handbooks to accompany the Royal Portfolio of Pictures and Diagrams (T. Nelson & Sons, London, 1897–1898)
Introduction to Fresh-Water Algae (K. Paul, London, 1902)
Fungoid Pests of Cultivated Plants (Spottiswoode & Co., London, 1906)
Catalogue and Field-Book of British Basidiomycetes up to and Inclusive of the Year 1908 (London, 1909)
^"Cooke, William Cubitt". Who's Who. Vol. 59. 1907. p. 378. William Cubitt Cooke (1866–1951), was a book illustrator and watercolour painter, who exhibited at the RBA, the RI and the RA.
