Leo Farmar


Leopold Farmar was a British botanist.
In 1893 Leo Farmar obtained certificates in book-keeping and arithmetic from the Society of Arts Polytechnic Centre in Dover.
Farmar was the botanist for the First West African Expedition of Liverpool University's Institute of Commercial Research in the Tropics. The expedition was conducted from the 6th of January to the 5th of June 1906. Its purpose was to "study problems connected with rubber, cocoa, fibre, and maize." The expedition visited Senegal, French Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast. Toward the end of the expedition, Farmar's febrile illness caused changes to some of the scheduled visits. He collected and mounted nearly 800 botanical specimens.
In 1906 Eric Drabble and Farmar were the two members of the economic botany section of the scientific staff of Liverpool University's Institute of Commercial Research in the Tropics.
In January 1907 Farmar became re-employed as a temporary assistant in the Herbarium at Kew, but shortly before his death he resigned from Kew to work for Henry John Elwes and Augustine Henry. He committed suicide in April 1907. He was to have joined Sir Alfred Lewis Jones's expedition to Africa for the purpose of investigating the possibilities for growing cotton there.

Selected publications