Ethel Sargant

Sargant was born on 28 October 1863. She was the third daughter of barrister Henry Sargant and his wife Catherine Emma Beale. She studied at North London Collegiate School under Frances Mary Buss at a time when all girls schools were considered an "adventurous experiment" and from 1881 to 1885 at Girton College, Cambridge. Her sister Mary Sargant Florence was a painter and feminist, while her brother Sir Charles Sargant was a senior judge. ==Career==

A list of Sargant's publications is provided in an article in the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History. She worked with Margaret Jane Benson, head of the Department of Botany at Royal Holloway College, and travelled with her throughout Europe in 1897 to acquire equipment and knowledge to set up that school's laboratory. From 1892 to 1893, she worked with Professor D.H. Scott at the Jodrell Laboratory in Kew Gardens, where she investigated the nucleus and the development of the male and female gametes in Lilium martagon . For the following years she specialised in seedling anatomy, giving a course of lectures on botany at the University of London in 1907. In December 1904, Sargant was elected one of the first women to become a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and she also became the first female on their council. After the deaths of her mother and sister, she moved to live at the Old Rectory in Girton village in 1912. ==After death==

She bequeathed her botanical library and bookcases to Girton College. The Ethel Sargant Studentship for research into Natural Sciences was endowed by friends in her memory in 1919. Some of the reprints and monographs she collected and bound by subject are now housed in the Plant Sciences Library, University of Cambridge. An obituary was written by Agnes Arber. ==See also==