Worthington George Smith  Worthington George Smith (23 March 1835 – 27 October 1917) was an English cartoonist and illustrator, archaeologist, plant pathologist, and mycologist. Worthington G. Smith was born in Shoreditch, London, the son of a civil servant. He received an elementary education at a local school and was then apprenticed as an architect. He married Henrietta White in 1856 and the couple had seven children, only three of whom survived childhood. Smith worked for the architect Sir Horace Jones, becoming an expert draughtsman and a member of the Architectural Association. In 1861, however, he left the profession (having been required to design drains for Sir Horace) and embarked on a second career as a freelance illustrator. He put his former experience to use by producing illustrations for "The Builder" (a journal still published today) and continued as a regular contributor for the next twenty years. Smith had an interest in natural history and gardening, and gradually developed a reputation as a botanical illustrator. His work appeared in the "Gardeners' Chronicle" and in 1869 he became its chief illustrator, retaining this position for the next 40 years. He also contributed illustrations to the "Journal of Horticulture" and other periodicals. In 1880, he co-authored "Illustrations of the British Flora" with the noted botanical illustrator Walter Hood Fitch. Worthington G. Smith's particular expertise was in fungi, which he collected, studied, and illustrated. He published extensively, writing over 200 articles and papers, as well as several books. His first major work in 1867 was to produce coloured illustrations of poisonous and edible fungi, printed in linen-backed poster format with an accompanying booklet. He published "Clavis Agaricinorum" (a key to British agarics) in 1870, wrote a popular book on mushrooms and toadstools in 1879, illustrated Stevenson's "Hymenomycetes Britannici" in 1886, and produced a supplement to M.J. Berkeley's "Outlines of British Fungology" in 1891. In 1875, Smith published a paper describing and illustrating the overwintering spores of "Phytophthora infestans", the causal agent of late blight of potatoes, the disease responsible for the great Irish potato famine. For this he was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Knightian gold medal. The German mycologist Anton de Bary pointed out that Smith had actually described some contaminating spores, but national pride upheld Smith's reputation as a plant pathologist and he was appointed to several governmental commissions on plant diseases, as well as publishing a book on the subject in 1884.