George Edward Post was born in
New York City on December 17, 1838, the son of
Alfred Charles Post. He was a professor of surgery at the
Syrian Protestant College in
Beirut, which became the
American University of Beirut (AUB). He had originally graduated from
University College of New York. During 1860, he worked as a missionary doctor in Syria. He later published 18 articles in
Arabic, including
Arabic Dictionary of the Holy Bible,
Classification and Study of Principles of Plant Physiology and Function and
Rules of How to Succeed and translated two texts from Arabic into English. Post formally described 221 taxa, and published an extensive volume on the Flora of Syria, Palestine and Sinai in 1896. He was also one of the contributors to ''
Smith's Bible Dictionary'', in 1893. Later, a new and revised edition of Post's seminal work was published posthumously in 1932–1933 by
John Edward Dinsmore, entitled
Flora of Syria, Palestine, and Sinai: Volume 1: A Handbook of The Flowering Plants and Ferns, Native and Naturalized From The Taurus to Ras Muhammad And From the Mediterranean Sea to The Syrian Desert, Vol I and II, and which includes a description of many new plants, including
Iris hermona. In 1875,
Pierre Edmond Boissier and
Charles Isidore Blanche published
Postia (in the
Asteraceae family), it is now a synonym of
Rhanteriopsis lanuginosa. Then in 1985, botanist
Evgeniy Vasilyevich Kljuykov published
Postiella, which is a
monotypic genus of
flowering plants belonging to the family
Apiaceae and named in Post's honour. For his work as a surgeon and missionary, he received the
Order of the Red Eagle from the Kingdom of Prussia. He died in Beirut on September 30, 1909. ==References==