George took orders and became Honorary Professor of the Royal Horticultural Society. He was a prolific author and speaker on botanical subjects; the separates from current publications between 1871–1915 occupy eleven bound volumes in the Linnean Library, indexed in his own hand, and interleaved with interesting MS letters from his correspondents. George Henslow believed in the inheritance of acquired characters in plants, and combated the newly recognised work of August Weismann.[4]
He married in Cambridge on 13 October 1859 Ellen Weekley (c. 1836–1875) but they divorced on 8 July 1872. In St Pancras, London in the 4th registration quarter of 1872 he married Georgina Brook Bailey (1843–1876). In 1881 he married his third wife Katharine Yeo (c. 1845–1919), the widow of Reverend Yeo of Ealing. George Henslow's third wife brought step-children to his third marriage but bore no more children. There were five children from his first marriage but only one, George Stevens Henslow (1863–1924), survived to adulthood. Henslow died on 30 December 1925 in Bournemouth.[5]
Henslow was a proponent of theistic evolution who held that "natural selection plays no part in the origin of species."[7] He promoted his Lamarckian theory of evolution in plants by direct adaptation, known as "the True Darwinism".[8]
He used this term in opposition to Neo-Darwinism, which denied the inheritance of acquired characteristics.[9]
^The Rev. George Henslow, M.A., F.L.S. The British Medical Journal. Vol. 1, No 3394 (Jan. 16, 1926), p. 124
^Bowler, Peter J. (2001). Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press. p. 38. ISBN0-226-06858-7
^Moore, James R. (1979). The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900. Cambridge University Press. p. 221. ISBN0-521-28517-8
