Pennell was born to a Quaker family on their farm near Wawa, Pennsylvania. Considered delicate by his family, he was excused from farm chores, which engendered in him a lifelong fear of water and incapacity with mechanical devices. Pennell was educated at Westtown School and then at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received a B.S. in 1911 and a Ph.D. in 1913. Encouraged by John M. Macfarlane, the head of the botany department, Pennell wrote his doctoral thesis on the Scrophulariaceae (as then circumscribed), a group on which he was to become a world authority.^[1]

From 1914 to 1921, Pennell was a member of the staff at the New York Botanical Garden.^[1]

In 1921, Pennell became Curator of Plants at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Undeterred by his phobias, Pennell engaged in a series of field researches on North American Scrophulariaceae, publishing an important monograph, The Scrophulariaceae of Eastern Temperate North America, in 1935.^[1]

Pennell died of a heart attack while attending Quaker Meeting in Media, Pennsylvania in 1952. He was survived by his wife, Anne, and one son.^[1]

In 1917, botanist Nieuwl. published Pennellia, a genus of flowering plants from America and South America, belonging to the family Brassicaceae and named in honour of Pennell.^[3] Then in 1970, botanist Crosswh. published Pennellianthus, a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Russia and Japan, belonging to the family Plantaginaceae and also named in honour of Pennell.^[4]

Notes edit

Bibliography edit

• Wherry, Edgar T. (1952), "F. W. Pennell", Castanea, 17 (1): 66–67
• Camp, W.H. (May 1952), "Francis Whittier Pennell", Taxon, 1 (5): 83, doi:10.1002/j.1996-8175.1952.tb01401.x

  Data related to Francis Whittier Pennell at Wikispecies

• Upenn.edu: Biographies of botanists — Francis Whittier Pennell