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William Darlington (April 28, 1782 - April 23, 1863) was a physician, botanist and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

William Darlington, the cousin of Edward Darlington and Isaac Darlington and second cousin of Smedley Darlington, was born in Birmingham, Pennsylvania to Quaker parents. He attended Friends School at Birmingham and spent his youth on a farm. He became a botanist at an early age, began the study of medicine at eighteen, and graduated from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia in 1804. He studied languages and botany for two years and went to the East Indies as ship’s surgeon in 1806 resulting in him being disowned by the Society of Friends for joining a military organization. A sketch of his voyage, under the title of "Letters from Calcutta," was published in the Analectic Magazine. He returned to West Chester in 1807 and was a practicing physician there for a number of years and wrote in defense of President James Madison's policies. He raised a company of volunteers at the beginning of the War of 1812 and was major of a volunteer regiment.

Darlington was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the Fourteenth Congress. He was again elected to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Congresses. He was appointed canal commissioner in 1825, and served as president of the West Chester Railroad. He founded an athenaeum and a society of natural history, of which he became the president, in West Chester in 1826. In 1813 he began a descriptive catalogue of plants growing around West Chester, with the title "Florula Cestrica" (1826), afterward enlarged as the "Flora Cestrica" (1837; new ed., 1853), containing a complete description and classification of every plant known in Chester County. He published several works on botany and natural history and served as director and president of the National Bank of Chester County from 1830 to 1863. In 1843 he edited the correspondence of his friend, Dr. William Baldwin, with a memoir, entitling the work "Reliquiae Baldwiniana." In 1853 the name of Darlingtonia californica was given, in his honor, to a new and remarkable variety of pitcher plant found in California, in addition to which a number of rare plants were named in his honor by naturalists in Switzerland and America. The degree of LL.D. was conferred on him by Yale College in 1848, and in 1855 that of Doctor of Physical Science, by Dickinson College. He was a member of forty learned societies in America and Europe.

He died in West Chester in 1863, and was interred in Oakland Cemetery.

Bibliography

• Lansing, Dorothy I. That Magnificent Cestrian: Dr. William Darlington, 1782-1863, Being a Short Introductory Biography. Paoli, Pennsylvania: Serpentine Press, 1985.

Sources

• United States Congress. "William Darlington (id: D000059)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• The Political Graveyard

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