Michael Cressé Potter (7 September 1858, Corley, Warwickshire – 9 March 1948, New Milton, Hampshire) was an English botanist, mycologist, phytopathologist, herbarium curator, and canon in the Church of England. He was the president of the British Mycological Society in 1909. Biography He was christened on 7 November 1858 in Bulkington, Warwickshire. After education at St Edward's School, Oxford and The Perse School, Potter matriculated at in 1877 at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a B.A. in 1881, an M.A. in 1884, and a Sc.D. in 1909. As the successor to Thomas Hughes Corry, Potter was from 1884 to 1889 the assistant curator of the University of Cambridge's herbarium, under the supervision of C. C. Babington. Potter worked as an assistant to Walter Gardiner in re-establishing the University of Cambridge's botanical museum founded by John Stevens Henslow. At Cambridge, Potter gave long-vacation lectures in which he emphasized 2 scientific trends: (1) what was then known as the "new botany", introduced by William Ramsay McNab at Dublin and by Thomas Henry Huxley and William Thiselton-Dyer at South Kensington, and (2) practical laboratory botanical investigation being developed at Cambridge under the direction of the reader, Sydney Howard Vines. From 1883 to 1889 Potter was a lecturer in the botany department of the University of Cambridge. Potter was a Worts Traveling Scholar (provided by the Worts Travelling Fund of the University of Cambridge) for botanical research in Portugal in 1886 and a Worts Travelling Scholar for the study of a tropical flora in Ceylon in 1888–1889. In 1889 he was appointed to a lectureship in the department of botany of Armstrong College (which is now a part of Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne. In September 1891 in Northumberland he married Norah Helen Silburn. In 1892 Armstrong College introduced a professorial chair of botany and Potter was the first holder of the chair. He emphasized experimental physiology in botany. During his professorship he gave evening classes for farmers and gardeners. In 1899 he discovered that a Pseudomonas pathovar causes white-rot of turnips. In 1887 Potter went to Heidelberg, where he attended Ernst Hugo Heinrich Pfitzer's lectures and thus became familiar with the Continental system of botanical classification. Potter used this taxonomic system in his lectures on systematic botany. In 1894 he was the translator and editor for the 3rd Danish edition of Eugenius Warming's Handbog i den Systematiske