as 'La Bray', or 'Tar Lake'. His report was read in London on the 19th of February. Five years earlier Anderson had conducted the first recorded ascent of Morne Garou, a mountain on St. Vincent. His description of its volcano and summit was similarly published in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1784, and the expedition was reportedly made possible by the hospitality of an unidentified Frenchman by the name of 'Mr. Gasco'. According to Lansdown Guilding, it was during this expedition that Anderson discovered the crater of Morne Soufriére. Previous to his appointment as Superintendent of the Botanic Garden at St. Vincent, Anderson had spent several months in Grenada before obtaining leave from General Matthews to visit the island of Dominica. He had formerly conducted expeditions on the Island of St. Lucia and undertook an voyage to the Spanish Main on Sibylle-class frigate with the help of General Cornelius Cuyler. Medicines and Pharmacopeia Many of the plants and seeds that Anderson obtained via his foreign correspondents were considered pharmacologically significant. Historians have shown that the profound ecological turbulence wrought by the large-scale cultivation of sugar had by the eighteenth century created a demographically catastrophic disease environment for miscellaneous Caribbean 'fevers'. In St. Vincent, high mortality rates were generally attributable to yaws, dysentery, malaria and smallpox. In a letter dated the 16th of February 1785, Anderson's predecessor Dr. George Young had written to General Robert Melville expressing his concern for the British soldiers reportedly dying at a 'rate of two to one' during their first four years on the Island, with children - 'almost all of three years of age and under' - particularly vulnerable to 'certain destruction in the West Indies'. In the scramble to find prophylactics drugs and treatments, Anderson experimented with herbal remedies in St. Vincent and later produced his Hortus St. Vincentii: a list of plants then cultivated at the Garden that he believed to be medically efficacious against diseases like 'dropsy', ringworm and rheumatism. Many of these plant species were sent to Anderson by French botanists at Cayenne, but others were obtained from the Island's enslaved population. References 1748 births 1811 deaths 18th-century Scottish people 19th-century Scottish people Scientists from Aberdeen Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows of the Linnean Society of London Scottish botanists Scottish surgeons Scottish gardeners 18th-century Scottish scientists 19th-century Scottish scientists 18th-century Scottish