James Mascall Morrison Crombie

Rev. James Mascall Morrison Crombie (1831 – 12 May 1906) was a Scottish lichenologist.

Biography Crombie was born in Aberdeen sometime in 1831, and attended Marischal College. He went on to earn his M.A. from Edinburgh University. His first publication was a small volume on the natural history Braemar in 1861. In 1862, Crombie became an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland. He was named Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1869. He began to publish his accounts of British lichens in 1870.

In 1879, Crombie was hired as a lecturer on botany at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, where he continued his studies on lichens. He determined specimens brought to him by travelers, and he delved into the herbaria of Johann Jacob Dillenius and William Withering. Many of his determinations were housed in the herbarium at Kew. Crombie, along with his friend William Nylander, rejected the symbiotic theory of lichens, which he passionate wrote about.

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